Swing Shift

Every year, at this convention I go to, Convergence, there is a tradition on the first night that is called the Kurt Russell Pizza Party that takes place in the movie room called the Cinema Rex, where pizza is brought in for everyone attending and we all watch a Kurt Russell movie. Now, I mention this because I have on occasion adopted this into my own home as well. Friday night is pizza night and I will on occasion partner this with a Kurt Russell movie. Tonight's selection was one that I had actually never seen before, Swing Shift.

Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Kay Walsh (played by Goldie Hawn) is left behind after her husband Jack (played by Ed Harris) goes off to war. Soon after, she gets a job at a local factory assembling airplanes for the war and strikes up a friendship with her neighbor and co-worker, Hazel (played by Christine Lahti). Kay also starts to come into her own as she becomes more confident in herself and sheds her previous housewife demeanor. She manages to attract the attention of one of the plant's supervisors, Mike "Lucky" Lockhart (played by Kurt Russell). She initially resists his advances over the next several months, but as loneliness sets in, she gives in and a romance between the two begins to bloom. Meanwhile, Hazel has her own troubles trying to gain the attention of the owner of a local dance hall, Archibald "Biscuits" Touie (played by Fred Ward). 

These days, this film is probably best remembered as when Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell fell in love for real and while watching the film it was easy to see why that happened. They make such a great couple and have such great chemistry that I wasn't surprised that the film had some re-shoots to try and beef up the romance plotline between Hawn and Russell, to the detriment of director Jonathan Demme's original vision for the film, which according to the reports I've read focused much more on the friendship between Hawn and Lahti's characters. Unfortunately, this only hurts the film in the long run because it causes us to lose some sympathy for Hawn's character as the movie goes on and Harris returns home from the war. You see, we would sympathize with her if her husband was a dickweed, but he's not. He's definitely a product of his time, but he's also supportive, at least to some extent, of his wife working in the factory and even impressed when he finds out she's been promoted to supervisor. Russell's character, Lucky, is also similarly jerked around in the situation. Granted, he should have known better chasing after a married woman, but I still couldn't help but feel some sympathy for him. 

Still, the film isn't all bad but rather a bit muddled and confused in some spots. As a whole, the film does take a great look at that period of time when women took a giant leap forward into a workplace that was previously considered males only and prove that they were more than up to the task. In those scenes, this movie really takes off with it's own can do attitude and shows the growing camaraderie between all the ladies, including Holly Hunter in an early supporting role. In fact, I wish the film had focused more on that aspect of it rather than on the ill advised love story because it was in these scenes that the film really came alive. Based on what I've read, this is where Demme's original cut of the film focused more and I wish the studio had left enough alone. I found myself wanting more with Lahti's character, Hazel, the aspiring jazz singer working at the factory to make ends meet. I wanted more of the other ladies that we only see in passing. Yes, Kurt Russell was a bonafide cutie in this movie and I really did like his 4F, trumpet playing, factory supervisor character, but the film should've been about all of them and would have worked so much better if it had been. In a film populated with so many colorful and well drawn characters, spending so much time on a doomed romance, with a run time of only an hour and forty minutes no less, is somehow less appealing to me.         

Growing up, one of our favorite films of both my mother and me was the film Overboard, which was a film Goldie and Kurt made a few years after this one. It piqued my interest in seeing other things they had done together, namely this film. It was never the easiest movie to find and when I saw it was airing on Turner Classic Movies, I made sure to record it. Was it worth watching? Sure, I even though it was a pretty good movie with some great performances (especially by Christine Lahti, who was nominated for an Oscar for her role in this). But, as I read more and more about the movie and how it was taken away from it's director and re-cut and parts were re-shot it really bummed be out, because it really could've been a great movie if they had left well enough alone. The truly tragic part is that by all reports the deleted material has since been lost and destroyed, so most likely we'll never get a director's cut to see what could have been either. It's a damn shame because that's the movie I would've loved to have seen.