The Swap (1979)

In 1969 a young Robert De Niro starred in a drama called Sam's Song. It didn't make much in the way of profit but it got him noticed. Ten years later, a filmmaker wanted to get De Niro onto his project but didn't have the resources to do it. So he took to stealing much of Sam's Song & incorporating it into his own film. The result was The Swap.Vito Nicoletti is released from prison after serving a twelve year sentence. He is on a mission to find out who killed his younger brother Sam ten years before. Meeting up with his late brother's friends, Vito finds that Sam was a porn filmmaker & had an underage girlfriend before he was killed. After a few close calls on his life, Vito sits down to watch the films that Sam had made in an effort to understand the murder. But upon watching the films, Vito realises that he had already met the killer.The Swap was a complete disaster in terms of story-telling. When De Niro found out about the film's existence, he nearly launched a lawsuit. But this cheap thriller is so poor that it cancels itself out, leaving it to be relatively obscure today. The main problem is that De Niro's character is turned from a young romantic lead into a pornographer & a paedophile thanks to whoever wrote the film's script. This is part of why the film fails to entertain. Anthony Charnota makes a poor hero but at least he takes himself & his work seriously despite his gruff demeanor. Lisa Blount, about three years away from making a slightly better impression in the zombie film DEAD & BURIED makes a strangely cold love interest / sidekick to Charnota's ex-con.

Great material for some future SNL skit. This one was a real stinker even back in the day as I recall. There's not much good that one can say about this film however it does give a reasonably realistic feel for the times back then.... but "groovy" it is not. I think this movie could be redone as a comedy however several attempts may have already been tried (aka Starsky & Hutch, The Legend Of Ron Burgundy,and, well you get the picture). I'm sure Mr DiNiro still winces when this one is brought up in conversation....but hey, it was "the crazy sixties" and decent indie vehicles were just in their infancy back then. The plot is overly simplistic and the film quality is grainy and basically matches the content for quality, or lack thereof. I wouldn't consider this film as "awful" but it won't be on my next Saturday Night At The Movies list for sure. (terrible waste of good popcorn!)

It might have been better to leave the movie buried. The film opens in the year 1969, with totally cheap 1960's production values, so imagine my surprise when I look it up here on the IMDb and suddenly find it listed as a 1979 flick, AFTER Robert De Niro's starring roles in "Taxi Driver" and "The Deer Hunter". A little research helps, and it turns out this film started out as "Sam's Song", left unfinished and unreleased, presumably because it was pretty atrocious, with the intervening ten years not helping it much. If one didn't know better, you'd have to ask yourself how De Niro ever became a major star, much less get picked for another acting role after being seen in this. But of course he probably wasn't seen in this back in the late Sixties - gee, it's starting to sound like one of those time travel stories that wind up making my head hurt.To give you an idea how bad this is, the female lead is portrayed by two different actresses (Jennifer Warren and Sybil Danning), and I constantly kept wondering why the film maker might have done that (now I know). I'd swear that Sam's girlfriend, later Andrew's wife Carol was also played by two different actresses, but the credits don't go there. To save you the trouble of going there yourself, De Niro's character is a maker of porn flicks, and an aspiring politician running for governor can't afford to have one of his productions see the light of day. I don't know about you, but I had the gov picked as the guy behind Sam's murder as soon as his personal assistant appeared on screen. The horny women were just a distraction to keep you guessing. Come to think of it, so was the title, because any swap that conceivably occurs in the picture turns out to be rather innocuous.Even though De Niro's name heads the cast credits, the actual lead role for this one is handled by Anthony Charnota as Sam's brother Vito on the trail of his killer. By the time it's over, Vito leaves a trail of dead bodies behind him, even though he was being closely tailed by a detective named Benson; the cop never figured in the story's resolution. I had to laugh when the picture borrowed one of those gimmicks from 1940's Westens with an unknown person shooting the older Erica through a window and Vito giving chase. Who shot Vito? I don't know. Neither will you.

This movie is a re-cut from Sam's Song (1969) so this is like a redone re-release. I guess that's why some of the actors were dropped from the listing for this movie (e.g. Sybil Danning). No big deal as this was not a big movie. Bad acting, bad lighting, bad sound, bad movie. Cut from a bad movie which was cut from some bad footage, I think from two different movies or something. Other than finding his brothers murderer I could find no plot, I'm still not sure if there's a good guy.See the listing for "Sam's Song" for a better description of this movie.