AllMovie

Written and directed by Peter Ustinov, Vice Versa is a one-joke fantasy comedy which manages to hold up almost to the very end. Anthony Newley plays the funloving son of stuffy stockbroker Roger Livesy. Father and son come into possession of a magic stone, and place a wish upon it. The result: Newley inherits Livesy's brain and personality, and vice versa. The best moments involve the suddenly matured Newley's besting of feet-of-clay schoolmaster James Robertson Justice. Not successful enough to spawn a cycle in 1947, Vice Versa is nonetheless an intriguing precursor of the brief spate of identity-switch comedies of the late 1980s--one of which was also titled Vice Versa.