The Swap (1979)

Genre: Thriller

Directed by: Jordan Leondopoulos (credited as John Shade)

Cast: Robert De Niro, Jennifer Warren, Anthony Charnota

Time: 88 minutes

After getting out of jail for an unspecified crime, Vito Nicoletti decides to investigate the murder of his brother Sam, a porn film director. Vito’s clear intent here is to find the culprit and avenge his dead brother, in what he refers to as an Italian thing.

In 1969, movie director Jordan Leondopoulos made a film called Sam’s Song, starring a young Robert De Niro, who was relatively unknown at that point, as a political filmmaker. Ten years later, Leondopoulos could no longer afford the star for his new film, so he decided to take archive footage from the original film and reuse it in a new story.

The story of The Swap is interesting enough, though the acting from Anthony Charnota, who plays Vito, is not very good. And you can see a clear disconnect between the old and the new footage. That was a very cheap tactic by the movie director to take footage from one movie to make another without the actor’s permission.

In the footage from 1969, you can catch a glimpse of what De Niro would become, and that is a great thing to see. It is too bad that these images were given such an unfair treatment to serve one film director’s purpose.

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