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.
Review of Swing Shift
