So many off the chart comic performances. Lots of homage to Hollywood and elderly comedians.
They had Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy who were both OLD Hollywood dinosaur comic actors... ex-Vaudevillians I believe. Born in 1908 and 1904 by Wiki. Old enough to have been in silent films. Denholm Elliot was old British character actor who was a POW in Germany three years after flying with the RAF in WW2.
Need we mention Senator Al Franken? I think not.
Cameo by Bo Diddley.
And on and on.
Hardly a day goes by that I don't work some quote or gag from TP in my pathetic daily life routine.
Assorted SNL relatives and friends.
AND It's a Christmas movie!
Not to mention that parts were shot in the New York Mercantile Exchange in the old World Trade Center during the glorious antebellum 1980s.
And the plot was outrageously good with the commodities market manipulation.
Eddie Murphy and Ackroyd hilarious as nth-generational pampered rentier punk Winthorp and Valentine the smelly grifter street homie turned Wall Street Master of the Universe. Lots of hilarious race stuff you couldn't get away with today.
Curtis
Framed musically by the Overture to Le Nozze di Figaro (alternate name La Folle Journee or The Crazy Day) at the beginning credits and, at the end, Figaro's aria Non piu Andrai to Cherubino sending him off to the hardships of life in the army, with Mortimer and Randolph becoming street persons.
Le Nozze di Figaro... It's an opera.