Freaky Friday (1976)

If you are a fan of sitcoms like Bewitched then this comedy based on the novel by Mary Rodgers and directed by television director Gary Nelson about a teenage girl (a perky Jodie Foster) magically switching bodies with her mother (Barbara Harris) for a day (Friday the 13th) will be your cup of tea. It's got the same contrived, double-take 'humour' and saccharine, squeaky-clean sensibility - the only thing it doesn't have, mercifully, is canned laughter. As with most paper-thin comedies it winds up with a time-filling chase sequence (which uses the LA viaduct seen in many Hollywood films).

It is an inconsequential film that was remade in 2003 to better effect in 2003 with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan  in the leads.

FYI: In 1948 Peter Ustinov wrote and directed Vice Versa about a Victorian-era son and father (Anthony Newley and Roger Livesey) who similarly reverse roles. The film was based on a 1916 novel by F. Anstey (who also wrote the novel on which William A. Seiter's One Touch Of Venus, another 'fantastical' story  was based) which has seen various film and television incarnations both before and after the Ustinov version.

 

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