wealthy married friends Andrew Moore (Jered Mickey) and Erica Moore (Jennifer Warren, who would play a similar character in Arthur Penn’s NIGHT MOVES). During the weekend, both Sam and Andrew sleep with the myste- rious Carol (Terrayne Crawford), a ménage à trois that will have fatal consequences. The film in- cludes a cameo by Andy Warhol’s “superstar” Viva, who appeared in MIDNIGHT COWBOY the same year.
Produced by Cannon, SAM’S
SONG remained on the shelf un- til the late 1970s, when Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus ac- quired the company and realized they owned a film starring the now-famous Mr. De Niro. Pre- sumably thinking that this art- house piece would have little appeal in post-STAR WARS America, Golan and Globus hired John C. Broderick (THE WAR- RIOR AND THE SORCERESS) to shoot a noiresque thriller which could incorporate a few scenes from SAM’S SONG, and thus be promoted as a new Robert De Niro vehicle. The result was released in 1979 as THE SWAP. Running 83m, Broderick’s film contains only 26m of Leondopoulos’ foot- age. It begins with the opening scene of SAM’S SONG (preceded by a title reading “1969”), show- ing Sam entering his cutting room, working at a movieola (the political documentary here be- comes a porno film!), and talk- ing to Andrew on the phone. But all this is now accompanied by “dramatic” music and intercut with newly-shot material depict- ing an intruder searching the room, hiding when Sam enters, and finally killing Sam (an obvi- ous stand-in for De Niro, seen only from behind) by hitting him over the head. Following the opening credits, we see a crimi- nal named Vito Nicoletti (Anthony Charnota) being released from
prison and setting out to discover who was responsible for the mur- der of his brother Sam ten years earlier. To this end, he inter- views Erica, Andrew and Carol, none of whom are played by the actors from SAM’S SONG (Sybil Danning, who bears about as much resemblance to Jennifer Warren as I do, appears as the older Erica). These interviews are intercut with “flashbacks” to Leondopoulos’ film. Although Broderick is credited with writing and directing the new scenes, the main director credit is given to “John Shade,” a character from Vladimir Nabokov’s PALE FIRE. Curiously, no screenwriter is credited on either variant. THE SWAP has fallen into the public domain, and is thus avail- able on DVD from numerous PD companies (sometimes under the title LINE OF FIRE). But the Dutch DVD (on the Carrefour la- bel) under review here, despite being packaged as THE SWAP (the sleeve boasts a plot synop- sis and cast list relevant only to Broderick’s film), actually con- tains SAM’S SONG. The un- masked standard transfer (in English with optional Dutch sub- titles) seems to run at 24 fps, so might have been taken from an NTSC source—likely a now-OOP Canadian release also titled THE SWAP, copies of which may still be found through
Amazon.ca. The print shows a few signs of age but, on the whole, is in sur- prisingly good condition, and certainly looks far better than the footage used in THE SWAP: the image is clear enough to reveal a poster for Robert Wise’s STAR! (1968) in the background as De Niro walks along a street near the beginning (a detail rendered in- visible in every other edition of THE SWAP I’ve encountered). Carrefour’s disc is bare bones with no extras whatsoever, but the film itself is a major revelation.
Even in the context of THE SWAP, it’s easy to see just how impressive Leondopoulos’ foot- age was (perhaps especially in that context, given the obvious contrast between the uniform excellence of the performances in the 1969 film and the sheer awfulness of those shaped by Broderick); in its original form, SAM’S SONG stands revealed as a key work of this exciting transitional period. Despite the nouvelle vague references (Sam is shown reading Andre Bazin’s WHAT IS CINEMA?), the main in- fluence is clearly Antonioni. A scene in which Sam asks Erica to translate a French love letter he and Carol have stolen from an empty house recalls La Notte’s letter-reading climax, and makes much the same point, demon- strating how these individuals can only relate to genuine emotions at one remove. De Niro’s role contains several anticipations of his work with Martin Scorsese, some general (the character’s tendency to be interested in people only to the extent that they can further his own narcissistic projects), others more specific: the dialogue about Sam’s non- existent war wound turns up again in NEW YORK, NEW YORK, while a sequence in which Sam pretends to shoot himself (mim- ing the roles of both killer and victim) might be seen as a rough draft of TAXI DRIVER’s “You talking to me?” speech. Incidentally, an IMDB con- tributor insists that a double-bill disc of THE SWAP and Ivan Passer’s BORN TO WIN (1971) released by Genius Entertain- ment in the US also contains SAM’S SONG, a claim I have been unable to verify (though the double-bill DVD of these two films distributed in Canada by Quality Special Products certainly does not include Leondopoulos’ original).
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