“If I were to make a picture that was badly acted, I would feel I’d failed.” – Peter Bogdanovich

Peter Bogdanovich has spent his entire career chasing the spirit of Orson Welles. As a mentor, friend and frequent critical subject, Welles has loomed large for Bogdanovich ever since their first meetings in 1968. Bogdanovich is at a point in his career where he is remembered by few and celebrated by none, not unlike Welles was when the two embarked upon the interviews that would later form the text of This Is Orson Welles, first published in 1992. Last year marked the fortieth anniversary of Bogdanovich’s proper debut as director, Targets. However there was no fanfare. There were no retrospectives. Part of this is likely due to Bogdanovich’s spectacular, Wellesian flameout in the early nineties, culminating with, possibly, the most disreputable project with which either director was ever involved. It is unfortunate that the sharp young man who was so taken with the elder statesman of cinema should have found himself following his heroes footsteps, this time towards obscurity, failure and embarrassment.

This year (specifically January 24th) marks the ten-year anniversary of A Saintly Switch, a telefilm Bogdanovich directed for the Disney channel wherein David Alan Grier’s football quarterback and Vivica A. Fox’s stay-at-home-mom/aspiring painter switcheroo, and end up trapped in one another’s bodies. The picture is positioned at the nadir of Bogdanovich’s miserable late-nineties output, which included, in 1996, To Sir With Love II, a made for TV sequel to the Sidney Poitier film (Poitier stars in it), The Price of Heaven (1997), about which no information seems to exist, Rescuers: Stories of Courage: Two Women (1997), also made for TV, and Naked City: A Killer Christmas (1998), made for, yup. TV. Coming off of The Thing Called Love in 1993, he would not direct a theatrical feature again until his ‘comeback’ The Cat’s Meow in 2001.

A Saintly Switch is a baffling film. It almost fits into the classic Bogdanovich cannon, with screwball situations abound, a comically immature leading man and slapstick on top of slapstick. However Fox and Grier are no O’Neal and Striesand. They’re not even Shephard and Reynolds. So just how bad can A Saintly Switch be, considering it may be the only Disney Channel film ever directed by an Academy Award nominee who counted among his friends the greatest filmmakers of the twentieth century?

“Color is the enemy of the actor. Faces in color tend to look like meat – veal, beef. Baloney…” – Orson Welles

The answer, of course, is very bad. This is a film in which children scream in unison at the hint of attic-based terrors. In which Rue McClanahan (above) shows up as a New Orleans voodoo woman named, of course, Aunt Fanny. In which the voice over contains nuggets such as “Yeah, things were pretty bad. Then they got worse. Then they got weird!” (exclamation point mine). To excerpt from This Is Orson Welles, when Bogdanovich and Welles are discussing one of Welles’ more regrettable acting roles:

PB: Who directed?
OW: Robert Siodmak.
PB: He used to be good.
OW: You can’t blame him for this one.

Bogdanovich cannot be blamed for this one; blame the script, written by Haris Orkin and Sally Hampton, each of whom has just one other writing credit to their name. However he did, presumably, read it. The study of A Saintly Switch takes on tragic proportions when one imagines Bogdanovich actually on set, calling the shots throughout the entire film. So, for example, when Grier and Fox are howling in shock and repeatedly touching their faces, it is hard not to assume Bogdanovich was behind the camera, silently longing for the effortless chemistry and comic timing he had at his disposal during What’s Up Doc?

As any work by such a strong filmmaker would, A Saintly Switch shows a few of Bogdanovich’s unmistakable touches. An inordinate number of scenes begin or end with a quick push/pull into/away from the character’s face. The music is almost entirely Louis Armstrong. The initial reveal of the switcheroo is done in a shot that lasts nearly two minutes. The lengthy, fluid final shot of the film - which tracks through the kitchen, into the living room, and from one character to another - almost certainly intentionally, is nearly identical to a shot in Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons where Tim Holt sweeps out onto the dance floor.

Deep focus. One of Orson’s tricks

Brief moments of directorial influence aside, watching A Saintly Switch is painful, and also boring. As hard as it is for a viewer to forget who the devil is making it, it must have been torture on Bogdanovich to direct lines such as, “This house ain’t old. It’s history” without thinking of his days discussing Ambersons with Orson at restaurants in Rome. Unique to A Saintly Switch, and setting it apart from most run of the mill switcheroo comedies, is that at no point in the film do Grier and Fox ever try to reverse what happened to them or, more interestingly, get the hang of acting like somebody else. They don’t even try; Fox is unable to open a bag of chips without it exploding all over the floor (like all men) and Grier cannot speak without enunciating perfectly, acting fey and waving his limp wrists about (like…women?). It seems unlikely that Bogdanovich had any influence over this, but maybe – just maybe – this is his added commentary on the difficulty of acting. Well documented as having great respect for the craft, this could be his way of telling the audience that not just anybody can deliver a performance that you will believe.

Perhaps it is wrong to so closely examine a film that was made as disposable entertainment, and chastise it for not maintaining the brilliance of Bogdanovich’s earlier films. However, A Saintly Switch proves, by virtue of its sheer irrelevance, that hard as one might try, it is probably impossible to maintain a sense of artistic integrity and dignity as your career falters and you take work-for-hire. This might be the most important and tragic lesson that Orson Welles taught Peter Bogdanovich.