Sometimes, one really can be a victim of success. Bill Murray is at least partially responsible for the existence of the summer comedy blockbuster, thanks to the success of Meatballs, Caddyshack, Stripes, Ghostbusters, and Ghostbusters II — films that all premiered big in either June or July.
With that track record, it’s no wonder that Warner Bros. fought to release Quick Change — an R-rated comedy that Murray co-directed with Howard Franklin about bank robbers trying, and failing, to flee New York City — in the heart of the summer season, putting it up against Die Harder and Ghost. Unsurprisingly, at least to Murray, the gamble didn’t pay off and the film which writer and co-director Franklin once called Murray’s “passion project,” finished seventh on its opening weekend while limping to a disappointing $15 million total. The numbers did not befit its brilliance and charm. It was a financial failure that stuck in Murray’s gut. Here he is, talking to the Orange County Register in 1991.
“I sound pretty cool now when I talk about it, but I could have killed someone back then. […]
It was like they killed my baby. It was a terrible time for me; I was completely baffled by what happened. […]
The Warners marketing department didn’t do its job. They knew weeks in advance that the public wasn’t aware of the movie. They track these kinds of things, and they knew that more people were aware of the capital of Burma than were aware of our movie.
Instead of doing something about it, or pulling it from the schedule and releasing it a few months later when it could have had a chance, they just opened it and let it disappear.”
It’s impossible to discount the effect that being a box office failure has on a film beyond the bottom line, and it doesn’t help that those numbers are frequently discussed by film fans. Murray, himself, bemoaned our growing fixation with box office numbers as far back as the Quick Change press tour in 1990, when he groused about it to Roger Ebert in an interview. Surely, he was aware that Quick Change was about to get clobbered, and that the stink of failure hangs on a film, even though box office results have nearly nothing to do with the quality of a film.
Why does this matter 25 years later? Because Quick Change isn’t one of the first movies most think of when they think of Bill Murray, but it should be.
Filmed in the outer boroughs of New York City, far from the romanticized Manhattan of Woody Allen and other filmmakers, Quick Change plays like a love letter to a now-foreign grimy and wild side of the city, albeit a sanded-down version that tests, but never truly endangers its protagonists.
In that, it resembles Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, but unlike that underrated gem, Quick Change doesn’t take on the city in a frenetic burst, and it isn’t as dark. Instead, the three main characters — Murray’s Grimm, his pregnant girlfriend Phyllis (Geena Davis), and their simpleton friend Loomis (Randy Quaid) — move through a series of sometimes silly and often strange challenges that turn their trip to the airport into an odyssey. Their desperation grows as it appears Grimm’s plan to rob a bank while dressed up as a clown before escaping as a hostage may be coming undone as the cops, led by a determined Jason Robards, pursue.
Quick Change isn’t a dark movie, but it is a cynical one. Phyllis doesn’t believe Grimm (who has ditched his life as a city planner to become a bank robber so he can finance their exit to paradise and away from New York) can be normal again after becoming a master bank robber and hides her pregnancy from him throughout the film. At several points, Grimm bemoans the supposed decay of the “greatest city on Earth” while observing the start of a transformative facelift that will eventually lead to the desecration of several once-great buildings, the spawning of retail chain stores, and the pairing down of the city’s unique aesthetic. Grimm’s not a fan of the people, either, mocking many with a few sharp barbs and a disingenuous, Bill Murray smile.
Interactions with Philip Bosco’s rules-obsessed bus driver, Phil Hartman’s nervous and armed apartment dweller, Tony Shalhoub’s non-English speaking cabbie, and Steve Park’s molasses-slow convenience store clerk all feel as though they were cut from the cloth of real life and then heightened. But there are other moments and characters that make Quick Change feel almost mythic… a bizarre, shirtless bicycle joust, and the ghostly image of a woman shouting “Flowers for the dead!” in Spanish on an abandoned side street in the dark of night.
Those scenes feel, at once, foreign to this film and vital to the notion that New York City is wholly unpredictable and that all of Grimm’s plans are subject to its whims. But most of all, they and the impeccably cast and written supporting characters (which also includes Jamey Sheridan as a street-side stickup man and Stanley Tucci as a mob flunky) give uncommon weight and dimension to the world that Grimm, Phyllis, and Loomis find themselves wading through. And it is this world that serves as a bridge between the two disparate halves of this film — the bank robbery at the beginning and the ending at the airport with its light twist and its nice bow.
Quick Change isn’t a near-perfect movie like Groundhog Day, Lost in Translation, or Ghostbusters, but it’s a unique and clever film that got buried under the rubble of unwise financial expectations. Watch it for the depiction of a New York that may have never existed. Or just because Murray saw something in the project that convinced him to give it a year of his life after a career spent starring in other people’s movies. Either way, while it’s almost fitting that a film about a frustrating journey would, itself, get lost along the way, the time has come to find it, keep it close, and realize that more moviegoers in 1990 chose to see Andrew Dice Clay’s The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. Need we say more about why box office returns seldom reflect the quality of a film?
