This 1983 comedy sees An American Werewolf in London director John Landis trade wolves for Wall Street, or the Philadelphia equivalent. Rocky Road?

Loosely based on Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, Trading Places has aged like fine milk. It follows a pair of millionaires (Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche) as they conduct a social experiment to test nature vs nurture, swapping the lives of a privileged white stockbroker (Dan Aykroyd) and a struggling black grifter (Eddie Murphy). The ensuing caper may be the most racist Christmas film of all time, no mean feat considering Home Alone 2 actually featured Donald Trump.

To its credit, the movie makes the case that it is environment, not genetics, that determines success in a capitalist society; a slap in the face to the Reaganite idea that rich people simply work harder than everyone else. But the film consistently undermines its message through racism, sexism and a general lack of generosity, falling back on offensive stereotypes, rape jokes and even blackface.

A ’40s-style premise with ’80s taste levels, the screwball comedy contains none of the genre’s wit or humanity, never bothering to make us care about any of the characters. The only likeable presence is a self-assured sex worker (Jamie Lee Curtis), but she too is constantly undermined by gratuitous nudity – and making her fall for Aykroyd’s Character implies she has worse taste than John Landis.

When the obligatory third-act crime plot kicks in (this is an ’80s comedy after all), the movie piles the characters onto a train (reminiscent of the Jamie Lee Curtis slasher Terror Train) and flies spectacularly off the rails. Wearing fancy dress of varying degrees of offensiveness, our characters are left stinking rich, having learned absolutely nothing. It is a clarifying climax in that it forgets everything it was doing apart from the racism, revealing that to be the point all along.