It seems impossible that this film was made almost 32 years ago -- Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn look almost unrecognizable in "Swing Shift," from 1984, directed by Jonathan Demme and also starring Christine Lahti and Ed Harris.Hawn plays Kay Walsh, married to Jack Walsh (Harris) in 1941. They're a happy couple. Pearl Harbor happens, and Jack enlists. Kay goes to work as a riveter in an airplane factory, working the swing shift. There she meets Mike Lockhart (Russell) who immediately pursues her -- for six months, until she finally agrees to come and hear him play the trumpet at a swing club. They begin an affair.Meanwhile, Kay has befriended her neighbor, Hazel (Lahti), who has had her heart broken more than once by her boyfriend Biscuits (Fred Ward). and she is also working in the factory.Kay finds a community in the factory, people she can spend time with outside of work. Then, abruptly, the war is nearly over, and Jack returns.Nice wartime story about the women left behind, the loneliness, their new independence, and a world outside of their homes. There is the expectation that this is all temporary. When the war is over, they will be let go, the men will return to their jobs, and the women will go home where they belong. Meanwhile the women have been given a taste of a new kind of freedom."Swing Shift" is about the societal changes during the war for both sexes. Men saw war, with its accompanying camaraderie, death, horror, and separation from loved ones. They came home to wives who may have been earning more than they did, who could fix the toaster, and had a new set of friends. It was a time of big adjustment.Hawn is sympathetic as Kay, a pretty woman who married very young and finds it hard to get along without her husband. As the man who doesn't care if a woman is married or not, Kurt Russell is fine -- he falls for Kay, perhaps picking up on her loneliness, and pursues her with determination.The showy role belongs to Christine Lahti, who gives an emotional performance, hurt by the man she loves and unable to get over him. Lahti has always been a wonderful actress who has given many powerful performances -- as an ex-hippie living underground in "Running on Empty," and in many striking TV performances. She shows her stuff here.Holly Hunter, Lisa Pelikan, and Chris Lemmon, who all went on to varying levels of success, have small parts. Good movie, and a good look at wartime at home.

The story of Swing Swift was probably played out several thousand times during the World War II years. While the men went to war the women did their bit in industries to keep America's industrial machine running. No doubt they developed itches that needed scratching. One such was Goldie Hawn, the protagonist of this story.On Pearl Harbor Day Goldie was the happily married wife of Ed Harris, who's nice enough, but a bit on the thick side and a regular alpha male. Harris goes into the navy and Hawn who doesn't want to live on just his allotment checks takes a job in an aircraft factory. She goes to work with her neighbor Christine Lahti whom she and Harris never really socialized with that much, but now they become best of friends.An even better friendship develops with musician Kurt Russell who because gigs are getting fewer and farther between also takes a job in the same aircraft factory. He still blows his trumpet at some clubs in the wee small hours of the morning after the Swing Shift. He's also a quite legitimate 4-F due to a heart murmur.Try as she might Hawn is unable to resist Russell's persistence. Then when Harris gets leave and returns all the issues come to a head.Swing Shift which has a nice score of 40s era music which is my kind of music would never get a bad review from me if for that alone. But director Jonathan Demme really does well capturing the mood of the 40s when we were a people united trying to save the world from one nasty brutal tyranny. The women are shown to have a really tough time both mastering the defense jobs they were doing and taking a lot from the men still working there.As we all know until recently Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn were the happiest unmarried couple in the history of Hollywood. That comes right through in Swing Shift and that carries a great deal of the film.Christine Lahti got Swing Shift's only Oscar recognition with her nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She was one sassy woman who takes nothing off no one in the human race. It's also left her sad and a bit bitter. Before Pearl Harbor she was a nightclub singer and that world has left a mark on her. But she does have the right stuff in the end.Swing Shift is a marvelous film recapturing a bygone era of a truly United States of America.

"Swing Shift," director Jonathan Demme's sensitive story about women who went to war with a rivet gun, begins the night before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Living in modest California bungalows, Kay Walsh (Goldie Hawn) and her husband, Jack (Ed Harris) live a simple and enjoyable life. Everything is suddenly changed with the Sunday afternoon announcement of the devastating assault on the Pacific Fleet and the Army Air Corps bases in Hawaii.Jack enlists immediately as do many of the couple's neighbors and friends. Alone, bored and motivated by genuine patriotism Kay goes to work at an aircraft plant that builds the tough, reliable SBD carrier-borne dive bomber. She strikes up, awkwardly at first, a friendship with neighbor Hazel (Christine Lahti), a woman with a nightclub-owning boyfriend. Jack had made some nasty not sotto voce cracks about her before he left for war.Kay takes to the assembly line and enjoys being productive. But she's also lonely - it was a long war. Her "leadman," a sort of foreman, is "Lucky" (Kurt Russell). He and she begin a friendship that culminates in one of those wartime affairs that happened very often and is realistically portrayed by Hawn who is torn between marital fidelity and loneliness (and, obviously, dealing with separation-enforced abstinence).Lucky is a 4-F. That meant he was "physically, mentally or morally unfit" for military service. In his case - phew - it's a latent heart condition.The affair goes through various stages, punctuated by Jack's surprise arrival on a forty-eight hour pass. Whatever suspecting his wife is having it on with Lucky may do to him, he's also both bemused and confused that as a "leadman," (she's been promoted) she earns more in a factory than he does serving in the Fleet. Harris's portrayal is of a man on the cusp of a social change he feels but can't really identify.There are a lot of ups and downs in this story but Hawn and Lahti in particular deliver strongly emotional and convincing performances. This was long before women could rise to general officer or flag officer rank and assume major wartime responsibilities. Hawn is Rosie the Riveter, the patriotic but largely uneducated and unskilled patriotic American female. There were tens of thousands of such women employed in every type of industrial work.Obviously the absence of husbands and the surfeit of available albeit older or not totally fit men aided the initiation of extramarital affairs. But "Swing Shift" also subtly conveys the reality that the women who went to work were empowered by the global conflict. Despite an ending that affirms the women's promise and duty to relinquish employment to returning veterans (the promise was unnecessary since both law and custom insured their rapid dismissal), American women were fundamentally changed by the liberating reality of serving their country by working (often for the first time) and earning money. The political, economic and social reverberations would be felt for decades. "Swing Shift" is fine entertainment but it's also a chronicle of an important aspect of America's Home Front.A fine movie. Available on DVD in a good transfer with no real special features.9/10.

I thought the film was excellent -- not only did it accurately depict what was going on during the war, but the interactions of characters was excellent as was the storyline -- it examines friendship, adultery, remorse and a wide range of other emotions.The chemistry between Hawn and Russell is so thick you could cut it with a knife -- this was, in fact, the film where they met and began their life together as a couple off-screen as well.Adultery was an all too common reality of war that should not be ignored -- this is one of the few films that shows what happened on this side of the ocean, rather than concentrating on the bloodshed and adultery on the servicemen side.In the end, the film takes the heartache and remorse and reaffirms the ability of people to choose to forgive, go on with their marriage and re-establish the love.