Review of Swing Shift (1984) by Shawn W — 01 Feb 2016

I think everyone has been faced with a very real nostalgia for WWII era America. Not for its societal norms, cultural standpoints, or even the war itself, mind you, but for its more artificial, material offerings. When bombarded with iconography of the time, certain images, sounds, textures, wash over me, affected by consumption of the good, not the bad, and not living in the decade myself.

Brass music softly plays on radios in white-picketed, suburban homes that keep their doors unlocked throughout the night. Innocent packs of kids play baseball in their school's dugout after school. A Technicolor, Betty Grable musical is playing at a nearby theatre. Teenagers go on dates in ice cream parlors where they sit at the bar in chromium swivel chairs, bashfully turning the other way as their date whispers a rose-colored compliment in their ear. Men are fighting overseas, but America is stronger than ever. Women have become factory workers. War Bonds are advertised as often as the casual Lucky Strike.

We like to romanticize the 1940s, to forget about their sexism, racism, classism, and other oppressors, because it is perhaps the pinnacle era by which we most often point to as being the "good old days," and perhaps because cultural artifacts of the time wear the handsome perfection of a Norman Rockwell painting. I, like most young adults who never had to face the inequalities of the time, am infatuated with 1940s America in concept, not for what it actually was.

So "Swing Shift" finds a delicate balance between glorious sentimentality and softened realism, so conspicuous in its design and tone that even hard truths that were certainly part of wartime have an unmistakable glamorization to them. It isn't unlike an uplifting women's picture; as I watched its frothiness move along with assured loveliness, I was reminded of such influential pictures as "Mrs. Miniver" and "The Best Years of Our Lives," which weren't afraid of WWII realities but still possessed a sweetness hard not to succumb to.

In "Swing Shift," Goldie Hawn, giving one of her best performances, portrays Kay Walsh, a housewife whose husband, Jack (Ed Harris), has decided to join the Navy after hearing of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Kay, a simple woman who has never felt conflicted in regards to her mundane life, finds herself at a crossroads with herself; not wanting to sit by passively as a war goes on, she hastily takes it upon herself to get a job at the local armaments factory and make herself useful. She quickly befriends Hazel (Christine Lahti), a neighbor who her husband hasn't been so nice to in recent years, and wins the affections of Lucky Lockhart (Kurt Russell), who pursues her romantically for six months before she eventually agrees to an extramarital romance.

Of course, Jack soon comes home, with Kay having to regard how much of her old life she wants back, and, of course, she and Hazel are kicked out of their jobs once the men come back home. But when "Swing Shift" doesn't present us with an unheard of sense of refreshment, it is made up for with a slice-of-life story that many women of the time undoubtedly encountered. Kay's affair is a pivotal plot point, but it isn't central. More important to her, and the viewer, is her friendship to Hazel, which changes her more as a person than any affair ever could. To be on her own, to develop relationships outside of what her husband might present her with - that is what empowers her.

Hawn is at her peak here, her doe eyes and giggling smile a front for a conflicted interior for once, and Lahti, Oscar-nominated, is very good as a woman whose reputation precedes her and affects her, despite a personality that suggests she couldn't care less about what those around her consider her as. There's a better version of "Swing Shift" out there, being 1978's Vietnam focused "Coming Home," but only because it goes further, emotionally I mean, than what "Swing Shift" has to offer. But the latter is still a winner, a honeysuckle rose of a drama that allows us to the yearn for another.