And finally for the 4th and last instalment of the contagion chain: Ted Kotcheff's Switching Channels.
Switching Channels was the 14th feature film directed by Ted Kotcheff, Canadian director of fair to middling talent who achieved some success in his native Canada, the UK and the US between the 60s and the 90s, his major, if dubious, claim to fame being having sat behind the camera of First Blood (1982) the first instalment of the lamentable Rambo franchise, and one of the worst.
Switching Channels tells you know what story, if you saw any of the 3 previous versions or saw or read the play, that is, as I haven't told it (Cahiers tradition, you see, one is not supposed to, so I don't, except sometimes I do), Hildy is a woman again, but her name is Christy (Kathleen Turner, major 80s screen actress notorious for being difficult, to use an euphemism, on and off stage, whose career was virtually cancelled by severe rheumatoid arthritis from the early 90s on, sic transit etc), Walter Burns is called Sully (Burt Reynolds, very much up to the task) and Bruce Baldwin becomes Blaine Bingham (Christopher Reeve, sic transit case to trump them all, in possibly the role of his life), the setting remains Chicago, but the time is the present (1988, that is) and the press is not of the printed variety, but television.
Now for a piece of MacMahonian revisionism: Switching Channels is normally dismissed as the least accomplished of the 4 versions, possibly because those who claim so were already a bit numb from watching the same story over and over, or due to the fact that presumed cognoscenti could not bring themselves to accept that the likes of Ted Kotcheff could ever match the likes of Billy Wilder. Well, The MacMahonian's verdict is: he didn't quite, but came quite close, this being possibly his best film and Wilder's at best an average one. The laughometer is tuned permanently to high without ever becoming overbearing and the several liberties taken with the original plot are overall fresh and effective. That and the unique 80s clothes and hairstyles, lest we forget how lame we once were.
As for the quotable one-liner you're all waiting for, get a load of this: Sully, explaining to a junior journalist why he is only sending one reporter to a summit in Brussels: “Nothing ever happens at summits and no one knows where the hell Brussels is anyway”.
And now a departure from MacMahonian practice, or rather, two: since we've just reviewed 4 versions of the same play, I'm not going to limit this reviews to the canonical five paras but ad another one – this one – to compare the 4. Plus instead of going about it in my usual verbose way, I'm going to present it in the score table below:
Score |
Film |
Script |
Hildy |
Walter |
Bruce |
10 |
His Girl Friday |
His Girl Friday |
Cary Grant |
Christopher Reeve/ Ralph Bellamy |
|
9 |
Switching Channels |
Jack Lemmon/Kathleen Turner/Rosalind Rusell |
Walter Matthau |
||
8 |
The Front Page (1971) / Switching Channels |
The Front Page (1971) |
Bruce Reynolds / Adolphe Menjou |
||
7 |
The Front Page (1931) |
The Front Page (1931) |
Susan Sarandon / Mary Brian |
||
6 |
|||||
5 |
Pat O'Brian |