Headscratchers / Trading Places

• I know Louis goes off the rails once he no longer has luxury. But why doesn't he just search for another job. He's a graduate of Harvard, and he's still pretty young. He could easily go to a library, type up a resume, land an interview. He has excellent social skills.
  • The drug and embezzlement charges would be a pretty nasty stain to overcome though, especially if they weren't dropped immediately.
  • Also that was his plan until he got sick and was ordered on bed rest by Ophelia. Seeing Valentine's photo in the paper set him off again.
  • He was accused of stealing from a private social club. All of those members and anyone who knows them would likely blacklist him, meaning there's zero chance he'd get a job anything close to what he had before. And someone like him is not likely to start at the bottom all over again, especially when it appears his social contacts were a large part of what got him there in the first place.
  • Did Louis ever get over those charges after he became wealthy again and had the Dukes bankrupted?
    • By the end of the film, he's made enough money to live life as he pleases without caring about the charges or his reputation at home, or he could have paid lawyers to fight the charges and get them dismissed.
    • And given that the Duke Brothers' fall from grace was probably big news that might have triggered an investigation into their past dealings, it's not impossible that someone else would have uncovered the circumstances behind Louis' firing, which would get his charges dropped (and probably more charges on the Duke Brothers).
• Exactly who are those two random women who are paired up with Billy Ray and Coleman on the beach at the end? Neither of them was even in the movie before.
  • A couple of rich dudes finding lunch dates isn't exactly a huge stretch.
• Clarence Beeks. Why are the Dukes paying him through their Company's payroll? If they don't, Winthorpe and Valentine would never have caught on to the Dukes' insider trading scheme. They even say Beeks has been reliable in the past, so Winthorpe may have seen his name before, but once they disgraced Winthorpe, and that close to the release of the crop report, they probably should have found a different way to get the second payment to Beeks.
  • They're not just idiots, they're cheap. Hiring Beeks with company funds can probably be considered some kind of expense for tax purposes rather than using their own money. As to why they didn't try to hide him better? They're also arrogant. You can apply the same logic to why they'd risk picking up the report from Beeks in person, or bet their entire fortune on the OJ scheme.