'Quick Change' At 30: No One Directed Bill Murray Quite Like Bill Murray

The story goes that Bill Murray and screenwriter Howard Franklin developed their adaptation of Jay Cronley’s novel “Quick Change” – released in theaters thirty years ago this week – with Jonathan Demme in mind to direct, but the filmmaker turned it down to make “The Silence of the Lambs.” (That abrupt transition mostly serves as a reminder of what a shift “Silence” was for Demme; “Quick Change” is much more in the mold of his earlier ‘80s films like “Married to the Mob” and “Something Wild.”) They asked Ron Howard, who turned it down because “he didn’t know who to root for.” (“He lost me at that moment,” Murray said. “I’ve never gone back to him since.”) In frustration, since “we couldn’t get anyone we liked” to direct the picture, Murray and Franklin decided they’d do it themselves.

“Quick Change” is, to date, Murray’s first and last feature directorial credit, and that’s a shame – not only because it might be his best comic vehicle (I’d argue it definitely is), not only because it so keenly understands how to utilize the Murray persona onscreen (though it does), but because, on the basis of this one credit, Murray is a genuinely gifted filmmaker. (This is not to discount Franklin’s directorial contributions, but anyone who’s seen subsequent solo efforts like “Larger Than Life” knows who the filmmaker was in that partnership.)

Murray and Franklin grab you – and fool you – from the first frames. We open on a New York skyline, with a big, brassy recording of Nat “King” Cole crooning “L-O-V-E”; it looks like the opening of a Nora Ephron New York rom-com. But that skyline is on a subway poster, mere advertising, and we pan directly from it down a line of miserable commuters, landing on our hero: Grimm (Murray), in full clown costume and make-up, stuffed on the train and then fighting his way out the door (with his balloons) against a tide of rude commuters. He gets off the 1 train at Times Square and heads to a nearby bank just as it’s closing, showing the security guard (Bob Elliott) his gun. He’s robbing the bank.

“The hell kinda clown are you?” sneers the guard.

“The crying on the inside kind, I guess,” Grimm replies, dryly.

With that, we settle in, thinking we know exactly where this is going – it’s a comic bank robbery movie, “Dog Day Afternoon” with clown noses. In the first act of “Quick Change,” we have every reason to believe we’ll spend the whole movie at the bank, since the premise is so juicy and the gags related to it land; my favorite is Chief of Police Rotzinger (Jason Robards) casually reading the first released hostage’s description of the perp (“Average height, average build, red nose, blue hair”). The notion is so irresistible, in fact, that it almost feels like Murray and Franklin are refraining from going in too hard on it, lunging for easy, hack jokes. They’re in for the long haul.

Studio comedies, particularly of this era, are often blandly assembled, so the craftsmanship here is striking. The bank robbery section is crisply shot and cut, like the “Dog Day Afternoon” throwback it is, with various factions (cops, crowds, vendors, and media) assembling outside the bank to play their roles. But it’s also done with a wink – the close-ups of magazines going into sharpshooter rifles are immediately followed by a close-up of mustard going on a hot dog, and there’s a great moment when their camera pans from Grimm musing “If we could just find a landmark” to the Statue of Liberty, hidden behind a couple of nearby box trucks.

Because, yes, he does escape, along with his accomplices Geena Davis and Randy Quaid, and I’ll refrain from revealing exactly how since the ingenuity of the plan is one of the movie’s true pleasures. And yet – that happens roughly a half-hour into the 90-minute movie, a third of the way in, because the actual juicy premise of “Quick Change,” per the poster taglines, is “The bank robbery was easy. But getting out of New York was a nightmare.” With a million dollars in bank loot in tow, the trio has a simple goal, getting to the damn airport and making their getaway, and that is what the bulk of the movie is about.

And in that hour, the comic gifts of this trio are allowed to shine. By this point in his career, no one knew what made Bill Murray funny on screen the way Bill Murray did – and he had plenty of time to reflect on it, doing much of the work on the script with Franklin during a four-year sabbatical from leading roles (between 1984’s “The Razor’s Edge” and 1988’s “Scrooged”). His delivery is a thing of beauty; he is impatient, put upon, and generally done with it, and he meets every barricade to their getaway with increasing derision.

But the picture also showcases his generosity as a performer. Plenty of actors have directed their own vehicles in a clear gesture of vanity, but you don’t get that sense here. Murray is certainly the star, and he gets his laughs, yet he leaves plenty for his castmates. Murray, Davis, and Quaid are working at different volumes and tempos – he’s the wiseass, Davis is the bubbling pot of simmering rage, and Quaid is an absolute maniac – and yet they fit, a stellar comedy team. Like the Marx Brothers, they’re doing different kinds of comedy that mesh seamlessly into one.

The real tell, however, is how often Murray shines the spotlight on the bench, a rogue’s gallery of ace character actors: Stanley Tucci, Tony Shalhoub, Phil Hartman, Kathryn Grody, Kurtwood Smith, Victor Argo, Steve Park, Jamey Sheridan, the aforementioned Bob Elliott, and the king of the character actors, Jason Robards. (“You couldn’t get that cast together for all the tea in China right now,” Murray mused in 2010.) There are so many good lines, even the day players get some; shout out to the guy in the van who groans “oh boy” after Grimm mentions his time in Vietnam.

If the comic filmmaking is unsurprisingly adept – I still giggle remembering the two cops in the background, trying to dust Grimm’s balloons for fingerprints – what’s noteworthy about “Quick Change” is that it’s not just a clothesline for gags, like so many of Murray and his “SNL” company’s feature vehicles are. Her secret pregnancy is a pretty tired bit, but Murray and Davis play the genuine emotion of their relationship, as well as her fear that “you won’t be able to go back to what you are” – a fear that’s understandably real, in light of her condition. And the framing of Robards’ police chief is savvy as well; a lesser comedy would make him a bumbler, an obvious foil. He’s not written that way, and Robards doesn’t play him that way either, because if he did, we wouldn’t even wonder if they’ll get away.

In other words, it’s a real movie. The editor is Alan Heim, no slouch at the job (he cut for Bob Fosse, Sidney Lumet, and Milos Forman, among others), and his juxtapositions get some of the biggest laughs in the movie (like the hard cut from Robards fuming “they’re getting further away by the second” to their getaway car literally moving in reverse). And he cleverly constructs one more neat little twist at the end – an arrest fake-out, in fact, one more unexpected connection to “The Silence of the Lambs.”

But the film’s MVP may well be its cinematographer, the great Michael Chapman. It was his third straight film with Murray, following “Scrooged” and “Ghostbusters II,” but before that, his filmography included Paul Schrader’s “Hardcore,” James Toback’s “Fingers,” and Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” – films deeply immersed in the grime and misery of their urban environments. (Just after his opening credit appears, Grimm trudges past a “Taxi Driver”-style Times Square peep show, where the barker supplements his hard sell of “Nude women! Nude women!” with “Clowns welcome! Clowns welcome!”)

Murray would never direct again, and it’s not hard to guess why. In a promo interview for the film in The Christian Science Monitor, he described directing as “a brutal exercise in details, details” and “a lot of really dull work,” despairing that “there’s such a sense of incompleteness about a movie. You feel it as an actor delivering funny lines, and you feel it especially as a director: You tell the joke in June of 1988, and you have to wait two years to get the laugh.” But if he steered clear of the director’s chair himself, it’s worth noting that after the experience – as if more keenly aware of what the job entailed, and how it could be done well – he began working with more idiosyncratic directors, distinctive artists like Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, and Michael Almereyda. Maybe it’s a stretch to say that without “Quick Change” he wouldn’t have ended up in “Lost in Translation” or “Rushmore.” But if that’s true, well, it’s just one more reason to love it.

“Quick Change” is currently available for rental or purchase via the usual platforms.