Swing Shift (1984)

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Okay, so, IMDb is my go-to when considering a movie to watch. And while I'll ignore a low scoring movie on the basis of having a number of my actual friends telling me a movie is worth watching, more often then not, when if find a film my friends cannot comment on, I draw the IMDb rating line at 6.4.And then here comes Swing Shift... My fiancé and I have been home watching Goldie Shawn and Kurt Russell movies tonight. She recommended Overboard (imdb'ed at 6.8) we watched first and sure enough, very enjoyable. So I was up next to pick. In researching I stumbled across Swing Shift. Ill admit that seeing this film rated at 5.9/10 I was hesitant. However I had also read that this is the film where Goldie and Kurt fell in love, that being the case, against my better judgement, I put the 5.9 rating aside and we watched it anyway. This movie was great! I gave it a 9star. It by no means deserves its 5.9 rating. I'll leave my review at that, and let you all decide on your own.

"Swing Shift" is a kind of a frustrating viewing experience, because you can see potential that was for the most part not realized. A combination of below average writing with some lacklustre performances is what mainly sinks the movie. The screenplay doesn't really flesh out the characters well enough; we don't really get into the heads of these characters and learn what is motivating them. For example, Ed Harris' character is shipped out so quickly, we learn next to nothing about him before his long absence. When he returns and finds out what happened during his stint in the military, it's hard to feel what he's feeling. Goldie Hawn's character is so vague (and has so little time in the beginning with Harris' character) that we don't feel one way or another with her eventual out of the blue decision to have a relationship with Kurt Russell's character. Making matters worse is that the main players don't give it their all with their performances; while Hawn and Russell fell in love during production, I couldn't feel any chemistry between them in front of the camera. Some of the supporting players do somewhat better, especially Christine Lahti. And the period detail is quite good. But those aforementioned problems, plus the sluggish pace created by director Jonathan Demme, end up making the movie a tiresome - and frankly uninteresting - slog.

Calling "Swing Shift" a Jonathan Demme film is like calling "Cape Fear" a Martin Scorsese picture. Sure, they directed these movies but were their hearts behind it? In the case of "Swing Shift", there's hardly any heart at all... at least not one that beats. The story centers on a housewife who's husband (played by Ed Harris) goes to war in 1941 after Pearl Harbor. As he's out fighting the Nazis (and/or Japanese), Goldie is called upon, along with many other women, to aid in the war effort by working in a war plane factory. Christine Lahti plays her outgoing and somewhat lusty best friend, a failed nightclub singer who's got the hots for Fred Ward, the nightclub's owner. And Kurt Russell plays one of the most despicable characters in film history... at least to me. A trumpet playing player named "Lucky" who doesn't have to fight the war because of a heart condition... which doesn't seem to exist as he can play trumpet all night, smoke, and have a great old time lusting after our married main character who's husband is risking his necks to literally save the world. A character who doesn't fight in Vietnam is one thing; but World War 2, a war in which "we knew who we were fighting", is something else altogether. According to Demme, the movie was chop suey in the editing room, making it more of a standard romantic comedy than a character-study of women working in factories. At the very end the women are at a party looking back on how hard it was, all the trouble they went through, and how they overcame and became good workers, but since the film centered more on the Hawn/Russell romance, the viewer feels as if they'd missed something... or, a lot of things. And the opening/closing credit song sung by Carly Simon is very out of place in a film set in the forties. It is a somewhat entertaining time-waster, I'll give it that. But it could have been much, much better, and the fact it does entertain at a certain level makes it more frustrating; adding insult to injury and leaving one limp by the closing credits.

This movie belongs to the women, particularly Kay Walsh (Goldie Hawn) and Hazel (Christine Lahti), who following Pearl Harbor Day were thrust into a change of life in obvious ways... then soon realized they were changing, as women, in ways that couldn't have been obvious to anyone at the time. World War II: Probably no event in history combined the collective awareness of a (arguably) free people into such an enormous scale of supreme cooperation for a cause. All the compulsions—from the draft, to rationing, to censorship—were generally accepted without question, and people voluntarily sacrificed of themselves in time, money, and energy to support the soldiers....For my complete review of this movie and for other movie and book reviews, please visit my site TheCoffeeCoaster.com.Brian Wright Copyright 2008