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(More customer reviews)"Swing Shift" has proven to be a marvelous nostalgia trip for those who remember the '40s, and for those self-proclaimed nostalgia buffs like myself who enjoy the music of the era.
Goldie Hawn has a childlike innocence as a housewife to Ed Harris in a working class neighborhood in 1941 California. Jack and Kay Walsh deal with Jack's having to work on Saturdays, a rather vampy neighbor at whom they make derogatory remarks when they see her going to work, and enjoy time at the roller rink.
While they are at the roller rink, the attack on Pearl Harbor is announced and their world changes. Jack enlists in the Navy and Kay decides to work as riveter, who helps to build airplanes at a local munitions plant.
She develops an antagonistic relationship with her neighbor, Hazel(Christine Lahti), the singer-turned riveter, whom she and her husband used to taunt, and an even closer relationship with a plant worker named Lucky (Kurt Russell)who repeatedly invites her out to hear him play his trumpet at club leading to gossip and speculation about their relationship among their co-workers.
During the course of the film, we see the reluctance of the women's male co-workers to accept them as equals in the workplace, and one of the male instructors gets a little too familiar with Hazel while instructing her on how to drill.
The unspoken problem in all this is the women's inability to defend themselves against sexual harrassment in the workplace at that time. In modern times, Lucky never would have been able to make the kind of advances that he made towards her in this film, at least not without Kay filing a complaint. This film suggests that such situations may have been common back then, largely because of this fact.It leads a viewer to wonder how many affairs between the female swingshifters and their male counterparts took place at that time, regardless of the marital status of either of them.
But we share the triumphs as well as the tragedies of the swing shifters; Holly Hunter, as Jeanne Sherman, receives her husband's death notice while at work, but later gives the audience a lesson in how life can go on afterwards.
Jack discovers his wife's affair when he comes home on furlough, and is heartbroken. As Kay tries to figure out how best to resolve the situation, Hazel and Lucky begin a dallience of their own after Hazel's relationship with her former boss appears to be over.
After the inevitable fight between the two women, they avoid each other at work. Lucky gets his big break as a musician, and leaves the plant, which makes it easier for Hazel and Kay to eventually make peace with each other.
I found this film--a counterpart to that other portrayal of life in World War II California, "Racing With the Moon", which was released the same year--to be a fine tribute the the women who helped win World War II--to their endurance of heartache and sacrifice, demeaning treatment, the realism of the marginalized treatment of the African American women at the plant, and the support that women in general can give each other in times of crisis. When Kay is promoted after saving a co-worker's life, we see how the men begin to respect their female co-workers for their intelligence. Interestingly, these themes were later echoed in the 1992 film, "A League of Their Own".
Sadly, these women had to give up their jobs once the men returned home from the war. But those who see this film should come to appreciate the way the women of this era paved the way for equality in the workplace.
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Swing Shift (1984)A film about World War II that examines what happened to the men and women in the factories making weapons rather than following the troops.Genre: Feature Film-DramaRating: PGRelease Date: 8-FEB-2005Media Type: DVD
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