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Trivia: Don Ameche's strong religious convictions


Reading IMDb trivia section and it says "Don Ameche's strong religious convictions made him uncomfortable with swearing. This proved to be a problem for the scene at the end of the movie, where he had to shout out "Fuck him!"..."

I mean, the guy was an actor...

But OK, let's put that aside and play along. So from a religious POV he has a problem with his character's swearing, but ruining a guy's life for a bet is fine. Not to mention being a greedy racist who treats people like scum. Or completely not caring that his brother is having a heart attack. But yeah, saying the bad word is a problem.

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I just looked up his filmography.

Mr. Ameche completed 46 films PRIOR to Trading Places (83)

In all those films he was never asked to drop a f-bomb.

Hard to fathom.



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Not really. Most of his films were made back in the days of the Hays code, which prohibited profanity (along with nudity, depiction of drug use, ridicule of the clergy, criminals not facing either death or arrest by the end of the film, etc.) Enforcement of the Hays code weakened throughout the late fifties and early sixties, but it didn't completely end until 1968, when it was replaced by the MPAA film rating system.

So Ameche worked for the vast majority of his career in a Hollywood where you couldn't drop any F-bombs on screen, even if you had wanted to.

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I think it IS hard for us to fathom. Knowing about the Hayes code is one thing, the effect of LIVING THROUGH IT for 40 years is quite another.The Hayes code was put in place primarily because of the Fatty Arbuckle affair and public outrage about the incident.

Generational taboos can be hard for newer ones to comprehend. I mean, what is so bad about the f-bomb?

I read a article a few years back in The New York Review of Books that helps explain it. Most of the swear words involve a crass depiction of standard animal behavior. The thought that as we, as humans, are ABOVE the animal kingdom because we have the ability to control our mating habits. The overuse of the word ultimately would reduce shame in the act, and could result in more broken marriages, bastard children and chaos in society as women and men jumped from one bed to another.

To argue that the resumption of the f-bomb in media is the primary cause our our downhill spiral in stable marriages is a little far fetched. But it probably didn't help our society much either.

** Btw I find it interesting that the f-bomb is now commonplace, but the word bastard is now taboo in media. I'm sure Don Ameche couldn't wrap his head around that.

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Lol didn't have much problems using the n_word though

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My point exactly.

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He did have a problem with saying “nigger”, which is why he agreed to only do one take of that scene because he was uncomfortable using that word.

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Exactly true

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I don't remember he ever says nigger in TP.
He says negro at one point.
Is any n word the n word?

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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wjkdynBFHuQ

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Allright he says nigger. I guess he says it so casually I missed it.
Yeah, silly he would have a problem saying fuck then, but I guess one is a derogatory term, the other is a curse word.

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The n word is pretty much the worst word out there.. Saying "Fuck" is a cute, fluffy bunny in comparison.

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Why is it nigger the worst one?
I hear it all the time, and black people use it as slang.
I have no problem with fuck or cunt either, curse words have lost its strength in the past decades.
They are just words.

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This is just my opinion, but from my POV it will never be just another derogatory term. I live in a country where there are only a few black people and I've heard someone say it as an insult once in my lifetime. But there's a strong, uncomfortable gut feeling that goes along with it that makes me hard just to write it here... I don't know any other word that has the same feel.
It's not just another insult, there's centuries of suffering going hand by hand with the word that makes it different.. It's hard to put it in words.

Even some top actors said they had a hard time bringing themself to use the word (Leo DiCaprio in Django e.g.).

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Its partly because its directed at someone ,
whereas "fuck, I'm hungry" is just . there .

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Always wondered this myself --- Black Fplks use it all the time with each other but If I use is --- I'm a Racist-- I remember a congressman getting io trouble for useing the word "Niggardly"to describe a bill

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Perhaps it's an age thing? Not so long ago nigger was a much used word and not necessarily offensive (Gibson's Labrador in The Dam Busters?). It was used for any black person and freely used in books up until fairly recently. I'm not sure when it became so offensive - 60s, 70s, 80s ?
I'm not arguing that it should still be acceptable but for a man of Don Ameche's age it would have been commonplace once whereas fuck never was, at least not in polite circles.

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Yes, this. He was born in 1908. To him, it was probably not a "bad" word. Just a normal word that would be used casually during his lifetime.

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Gah!! Using the N word by his character was to reinforce the idea racism is bad. People need to separate the actor from the character he was playing. Ameche using that word was to establish the state of the world and in particular the locale the story took place in. Uttering f-ck was not crucial for that and Ameche plus Bellamy did an excellent job in portraying the Duke brothers as a-holes. Do people believe that Carroll O'Connor was most probably a racist for some of the slurs uttered by his character Archie Bunker? Evidently so as the appreciation of All In The Family has fallen greatly of a show that took on many social issues in its day. The best actors can throw an image that is not remotely reflective of their real life attitudes.

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Pshaw... There you go using logic and common sense. Don't you know that's not allowed anymore? The "antiracist" zealots of today are not interested in context. If you utter the word, you must be destroyed. Period.

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I miss a sane world. Sadly, it is gone forever, and we are living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare where the wokesters and cancellers are too dumb to realize that they are straight up communists.

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Yes, I miss that too. I was just watching a video of an early 1980s bikini contest on YouTube, and thinking how eagerly I would go back to then if I could, to a time when the women were gorgeous, had no silicone, no duck lips, and (God be praised!) no tattoos (okay, the hair was pretty bad, but hairstyles aren't permanent); but also to a time when the U.S. didn't look like a declining power, and best of all, our society hadn't collectively lost its F@#%ING mind. Our urban centers weren't covered in feces and tent cities, there wasn't a panhandling bum posted at every stop light, and race relations were actually improving. We were actually moving closer toward MLK's ideal of a colorblind society.

Now, we're being told that if we desire a colorblind society, we are racist -- i.e. to want society to transcend racism is itself racist. Somehow. And if you believe Imbram Henry Henry Rogers (AKA Ibram X. Kendi), the only way to combat racial discrimination is to employ discrimination -- so-called antiracist discrimination. But try to spin it how you will, it still amounts to empowering elites to categorize people, and pick winners and losers in society based on those same people's immutable characteristics. In a word: racism.

See? To be antiracist, you have to be racist, just turn your ire on a different target.

And you'd think that enough people would have noticed that this approach has set race relations back fifty years, that our society is becoming increasingly tribal, and race relations are now worse than they have ever been since the Civil Rights era, but you would be wrong.

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People set their limits in interesting ways. Some married actors won't do love scenes or kissing with a co star due to their religious beliefs but then have no issue with violence. I understand that the kissing would be real and the violence not real but it still seems weird to be comfortable presenting one and not the other.

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I do think there's something different between actually touching a woman who's not your wife in an intimate way and fake punching or shooting somebody.

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