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This is really worth rediscovering - Turner and co really throw themselves into it and (shock) Reeve sends himself up excellently (particularly good in the 'vertigo in the lift' scene.

As revealed elsewhere, it's a remake of The Front Page - in fact right now can't think of a better way to spend a rainy afternoon than a double bill of these two in front of a nice fire :-)

So - not going to change your life - but I'll cheer you up.

The Front Page is one of those theater properties that apparently is not tiring with the public any time soon. Either remaking it as a period piece the way Billy Wilder did or updating it like this film and switching it to broadcast television journalism the laughs are there and the issues are the same. The Broadway play and first film adaption with also talked about bloviating politicians who campaign on law and order. If anything it's worse now.

Howard Hawks saw the possibilities in The Front Page as a boy/girl romance by making the original role of the reporter as a woman. What he got was one of my favorite Cary Grant films. Switching Channels is a remake of His Girl Friday and the roles Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, and Ralph Bellamy played are now done by Burt Reynolds, Kathleen Turner, and Christopher Reeve. And of course Reynolds is now a news producer, Turner his ace reporter, and Reeve the handsome rich doofus she wants to marry.

Again it's an outrageously corrupt Ned Beatty playing the Cook County District Attorney who primarying the ineffectual Governor of Illinois Charles Kimbrough. He got a conviction on Henry Gibson for murdering a cop and he's looking to see that as Gibson burns in the electric chair, he can become governor and more. Kimbrough is the kind who takes a poll before he goes to the bathroom. But Gibson escapes on the night he's to die and sets off a whole chain of events in which elected officials are toppled, romance gets redirected, and corruption exposed.

It is fascinating how on track Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur were when they wrote The Front Page. We could remake it again updating it with internet journalism without too much of a change in the plot.

Start thinking of who could be the stars in yet a 21st century remake of this classic.

I thought the updating of the Front Page to the electronic era was surprisingly relevant and poignant. Henry Gibson is a standout in an excellent cast. The laughs and stories are updated for modern audiences and lose surprisingly little in the translation. The chemistry between Reynolds and Turner is pretty hot. All in all quite entertaining.

This umpteenth version of the Front Page story made the quite appropriate adaptation from newspaper journalism to television.

Although the character names have been changed we have no problems identifying the main characters of the Front Page. As in His Girl Friday, Hildy is played by a woman and Kathleen Turner was the ideal choice for this role at the time. Burt Reynolds takes on the Walter Burns character, but he neither has the charm of Cary Grant [His Girl Friday] nor the comic timing of Walter Matthau [Front Page, The (1974)] - but then, who has? The only serious miscasting is Christopher Reeve who just can't match the whimpish Ralph Bellamy.

All in all it's not as good as the previous (excellent) versions, but it is still quite enjoyable. A story with that many remakes normally has a stinker amongst the lot, but this one has not (so far).

Christy is a news anchor on SNN, an all-news channel in Chicago. Her boss John "Sully" Sullivan is also her ex. Christy must go do lots of silly stories as part of her role as a journalist, and eventually she decides to take a vacation. That's where she meets Blaine, who is rich and perfect in every way, and Christy wants to move with him to New York City and host a morning show. Sully hates him and plots against him. Meanwhile, Christy has a chance to do something important before she moves on from real journalism. Ike Roscoe is on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Roy Ridnitz is running for governor but played a role in putting Ike away, and it would not benefit him politically if Ike got freed.

So how will Ike be rescued from his fate? The second half of this movie is nothing short of insanity, a wacky adventure that really makes this movie worth seeing.

Kathleen Turner and Burt Reynolds are good, if not necessarily great. Ned Beatty is over the top. Chris Kimbrough as the governor who could give Ike a reprieve is a moron. And Henry Gibson is great as the poor man who must be rescued because, after all, he didn't do it.

Christopher Reeve, on the other hand, is more Clark Kent than Superman. He just never quite achieves what he should. I didn't know who he was, but he didn't quite look like Richard Gere, or David Hasselhoff, or John Corbett. I just never could enjoy his character, except for the bizarre scene where Sully get his revenge.

The romantic comedy at the beginning is okay. It's the adventure toward the end that really makes this work.