Jay Cronley, Howard Franklin, and Bill Murray, 1990
This movie isn’t part of the 20th century series, which surprises me, because if you were to ask me what I would have listed as my favorite movies back in 1999 when I drew up the list I’ve been using, I’d think it almost a guarantee that this one would have made the cut. I think I still have a VHS copy in my storage space, taped off one of the cable channels nearly thirty years ago, and I wouldn’t even venture a guess at how many times I watched it back in the ’90s. But apparently I haven’t watched it since, so before moving on to 2015 I thought I’d watch this with Ellie and see how it held up.
The premise is that a witty, roguish bank robber and his two accomplices pull off an audacious heist and hightail it to the airport—except this is New York, and you can’t make a trip from Manhattan to JFK without getting derailed by half a dozen absurd disasters. The first time I saw this movie—and every other time I saw this movie before now, for that matter—I had no personal experience with this; it wasn’t until 2001 that I moved to New York and discovered what sorts of misadventures inevitably followed any attempt to get from Point A to Point B within that city. (During my year in NYC, the Calendar section of my site read like a compendium of deleted Quick Change scenes. I still get a lot of mileage out of the sudden rainstorm that reduced the contents of my wallet to papier-mâché while a homeless guy on the same street corner as me marveled to his pal, “I’m wettin’ my pants an’ I can’t even tell!”) At the time it just seemed like wacky episodic comedy of a sort I was into at the time. For instance, Monty Python and the Holy Grail has the same basic structure: our protagonists have a destination to reach, and on each leg of their journey, they are confronted with a new weirdo or set of weirdos to get by in one way or another. But to a certain extent all of the above is kind of burying the lede. Quick Change is the only movie, at least as of this writing, directed by Bill Murray, and it is therefore perhaps no surprise that it is largely a delivery system for Groundhog Day-era Bill Murray and his line readings. So even if 1999-me was correct to leave this one outside the pantheon, that’s still a pretty good recommendation!
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