Last night at dinner my daughter Milly asked me for my list of the most underrated films of all time. I’m still thinking about Milly’s challenge, but I could identify at least one film off the top of my head: Quick Change.
Currently available on YouTube, Quick Change is a 1990 film that seamlessly mashes up three of my favorite genres: it is simultaneously a heist film, a movie about New York City, and a Bill Murray rom-com.
Murray (who also directs, for the first and only time in his career) is typically excellent as Grimm, a struggling city planner who is desperate to leave New York. To bankroll his exit, Grimm plans a bank heist, which he undertakes while dressed as a clown to hide his identity.
The heist, which is seamlessly executed and briskly filmed, takes up the first 20 minutes or so of Quick Change. The remainder of the film’s running time is spent on Grimm’s escape from New York, as he attempts to catch a plane with his loot alongside his girlfriend (played by Geena Davis) and best friend (Randy Quaid).
Suffice it to say that the getaway goes much less smoothly than the heist. Along the way to JFK, the trio must navigate increasingly desperate situations and engage with a murderer’s row of character actors, including Jason Robards, Phil Hartman, Tony Shalhoub, and Stanley Tucci. (For me, the best of the lot is Kurtwood Smith, who plays the movie’s principal villain, the perpetually unhinged Russ Crane, with Phillip Bosco’s volatile bus driver coming a close second.)
The film that Quick Change most closely resembles is probably After Hours, Martin Scorcese’s 1985 black comedy which depicts a single bizarre night in Soho. Both films feature a protagonist desperately trying to maintain his equilibrium despite stumbling into a series of unpredictable, “only-in-New York” scenarios.
I like After Hours a lot, but for my money Quick Change is funnier, more suspenseful, and has more to say about New York. Notably, after the bank heist, the rest of Quick Change takes place in the outer boroughs. (This includes a jousting scene filmed not far from the Red Hook Community Justice Center in Brooklyn.) Thank god for the internet: someone has gone to great lengths to document every single NYC location that appears in Quick Change. You can find his exhaustive work here.
Quick Change catches New York in a moment of transition. As Jason Bailey notes in his history of New York films, Fun City, the film was “a hinge from on-screen portrayals of the city as a dirty, scuzzy hellscape into a gentrified urban space.”
In Quick Change, the city is a place of chaos, disorder, and dysfunction. Among other obstacles, over the course of the film Grimm must confront gangsters, rule-bound government workers, and a collection of inconsiderate and unneighborly New Yorkers. Multiple characters pull a gun on him. In real life, not long after Quick Change was filmed, New York City reached its nadir with more than 2,000 murders in a single calendar year.
But Quick Change also hints at the city’s rebirth. Both Grimm and his antagonist, Jason Robards’ police chief, note that significant real estate development is in the works. And rising rents are pivotal to Phil Hartman’s cameo in the film.
In Quick Change, sadness and desperation lurk around almost every corner. One of my favorite scenes depicts a lonely street where for obscure reasons a woman cries out “flores para los muertos!” over and over again.
But even as it shows us why Grimm would want to leave New York, Quick Change also captures the diversity, vitality, and quirkiness of the city. I first moved to New York just a couple of years after Quick Change came out. The city has changed a lot since then, but those qualities have remained constant.
In sum, Quick Change is three great films in one. The bank heist is genuinely exciting. Bill Murray is laugh-out-loud funny. And the New York City footage is insightful about the character of the city.
Despite all these charms, Quick Change is rarely mentioned in lists of great New York City films — or lists of the best Bill Murray films, for that matter. So that’s why it is my knee-jerk choice for most underrated movie of all time.