THE SWAP (a.k.a. SAM'S SONG)
De Niro's footage: 1969 "The Swap" footage: 1980
Rating: 0/5
Review by John Ulmer
In 1969 Robert De Niro starred in an unreleased short film entitled "Sam's Song," about a group of people on a yacht, or something to such an effect. It seemed to have no plot – and no budget, either, as it was left on the cutting room floor: Where it should have stayed, but it didn't.
Because in 1980 Cannon Films got their hands on the footage. De Niro, by now a huge star (having been in "Taxi Driver" and "The Deer Hunter"), was obviously enough of a celebrity to market the picture. Slap his face on a few VHS covers, and you've got yourself a movie.
That's what Cannon did. They took the old footage and inserted it into an entirely new movie that had nothing to do with "Sam's Song." They called this new incarnation "The Swap" – ironic, eh?
"The Swap" takes scenes from "Sam's Song" and intercuts them with a cheesy film noir revenge story about a guy who gets out of jail to avenge the murder of his brother. It also re-writes its own plots to revolve around the original scenes. De Niro watches a porn movie in the beginning, so instead of merely assuming he likes pornography, "The Swap" decides to add a little "twist" into the plot: Sammy (De Niro) was a porn director and he made kiddie porn with 12 and 13-year-olds. Surprisingly, this fact is presented to us in the film quite casually – it's never mentioned twice. Sammy's friends don't care, and neither do the filmmakers, evidently.
Sam's brother Vito, freshly released from jail, decides to do some investigating and unveils a secret plot that has something to do with Sam's murder. Halfway through the film we get a tacky flashback of Sam aboard a yacht with his friends. This was essentially the only footage of the original "Sam's Song" and it makes no sense to put it in "The Swap" because it has absolutely nothing to do with the story.
I don't know what to say about this movie because it really isn't a movie. It's a sloppy promotion for a film company that took fifteen minutes of footage from an unfinished film and slapped them in between scenes from another.
It's about as nonsensical as taking "Raging Bull" and dropping scenes from "Once Upon a Time in America" in various places, then trying to create a plot connecting the two together. Final analysis: Utterly ridiculous, and not even for De Niro's fans as it was clearly made against his own cooperation.
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