MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Quick Change’ Makes for a Giddy Getaway

The light comic wit of “Quick Change” (citywide) has a lovely premise: a trio of disillusioned New Yorkers, Grimm (Bill Murray), a city planner; his sweetheart Phyllis (Geena Davis) and Grimm’s goofy, longtime friend and liability, Loomis (Randy Quaid), execute a brilliantly clever bank holdup, exiting with $1 million. Now all they have to do to be home free is get out of the city of New York, an urban obstacle course of unmarked streets, wayward freeway entrances and unfriendly natives.

New Yorkers are chuckling already, the know-it-alls. But you don’t need to live there to spot the pitfalls in the trio’s starkly simple plan. The comedy of “Quick Change” is city-dweller humor, honed to a fine edge and site-specific to New York because the Big Apple is more or less on its knees, civility-wise. All it needs is a lethally funny comedy like this to give it the coup de grace .

In love with each other and unable to take Manhattan--any more in any form--Grimm and Phyllis are decamping for reasons the movie makes abundantly clear: New York is a city gone a little bonkers. English-speaking cabbies are a memory; middle-class, multiple-burglary victims carry handguns the way others pack Tic-Tacs, and the best way to bum out the crowd swarming toward an accident scene is to announce that the victim might just live.

With “Quick Change,” screenwriter Howard Franklin and co-producer/star Bill Murray make their joint--and auspicious--debuts as directors. They excel at deadpan vignettes of the city, like the early scene when news of the ongoing bank robbery almost causes a collision between arriving SWAT units and arriving hot-dog push-carters, each jockeying for the commanding position. They also get nearly excruciating suspense from the correct-change-for-the-bus routine or the dithering frenzy of waiting behind a $100 customer at a mom-and-pop grocery store. “Quick Change,” as well as Jay Cronley’s very funny novel on which Franklin based his script, is full of snapshots like this. (It’s eerie how close Franklin has stuck to Cronley’s throw-away timing and sardonic humor while actually straying far from the novel’s story line.) Then, just when we think we’ve got the movie’s sardonic rhythms down pat, the filmmakers throw a little curve--tongue-in-cheek reference to Tennessee Williams or Garcia Lorca or a surreal episode like the barrio jousters--which lifts the material up, up and away beyond the expected.

Actually, “Quick Change,” which has been edited to whip by in record time, could use even more of these singular diversions; they’re like the pure comic side of “After Hours’ ” semi-sinister Manhattan nightmares. Literate humor is at a premium and these actors, including Jason Robards’ world-weary, underplayed police chief, are so intoxicatingly expert that it’s almost sinful to have their film over as soon as it is. As their orderly exit plan crumbles around them, the unflappable Grimm becomes almost fiendishly good at bluffing their way out of mortal danger. Phyllis, on the other hand, has no stomach for such cliffhangers; her huge eyes get even bigger as she begins to envision the man she loves as a born desperado who has simply bloomed late. Ricocheting between them both is Randy Quaid’s Loomis, whose hysteria bloomed early and surfaces often. However, considering that in the movie’s last third Quaid is one of the walking wounded, dragging himself along like some comic parody of “The Night of the Living Dead,” his panic is understandable.

At any rate, all three are offbeat and wonderful characters in a movie whose visual and physical gags--some of them as old as silent movies--are as sharp as its dialogue, and whose cumulative effect is as achingly funny as “A Fish Called Wanda.” At the same time, the humor doesn’t have a smug or an inside feel to it, like the overflowing in-jokey references of “Gremlins 2.”

Produced by longtime Woody Allen cohort and Manhattan authority Robert Greenhut, richly photographed by Michael Chapman with succinct editing by Alan Heim, “Quick Change” (rated R for language) has a slyly understanding supporting cast, beginning with the garrulous bank guard played by Bob and Ray’s Bob Elliott, Jack Gilpin’s hateful yuppie hostage, Philip Bosco’s punctilious bus driver, and Tony Shalhoub’s monumentally funny cab driver, who very nearly turns himself inside out in an effort to make himself understood by an uncomprehending world.

The film is dedicated to a longtime associate of Francois Truffaut, the late Helen Scott, who first brought the book to the filmmakers’ attention. And so a cinematic lineage continues, tangibly and with bright results.

‘QUICK CHANGE’

A Warner Bros. release of a Devoted production. Producers Robert Greenhut, Bill Murray. Executive producer Frederic Golchan. Directors Howard Franklin and Murray. Screenplay Franklin, based on the novel by Jay Cronley. Camera Michael Chapman. Editor Alan Heim. Music Randy Edelman. Art director Speed Hopkins, set decorator Susan Bode. Sound Les Lazarowitz. Costumes Jeffrey Kurland. With Bill Murray, Geena Davis, Randy Quaid.

Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian).