Swing Shift

This terrific wartime romance/friendship drama may have been an unpleasant chapter in the career of Jonathan Demme, but it was a high point for stars Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, as it was the project they were working on when they started their four-decade-long romantic relationship. Swing Shift is one of those movies that's more famous for being recut and reshot during post-production than for the film itself, which is too bad, as it's a very good movie. Swing Shift was one of the first pictures to showcase how America relied on women entering the workforce during the war and then expected them to return to their traditional roles when the men came home. It centers on a group of California women who went to work at a local aircraft plant during WWII.

Goldie stars as Kay Walsh, whose husband, Jack (Ed Harris), enlists in the Navy shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Soon after, Kay signs up to work in an armaments factory while Jack is overseas. There, she befriends Hazel (Christine Lahti), a nightclub singer who lives across the way from her, and Lucky (Russell), the foreman with eyes for her who moonlights as a jazz trumpet player. They all become good friends, and the women of the factory (including Susan Peretz, Belita Moreno, Sudie Bond, Patty Maloney, Lisa Pelikan, and a young Holly Hunter) become increasingly adept at their jobs. However, Kay's life gets complicated when she and Lucky strike up a romance.

Swing Shift was an original screenplay by Nancy Dowd, the writer of Slap Shot and Coming Home and script doctor to a number of high-profile '80s pictures. When Hawn's production company optioned it, Bo Goldman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Rose, Melvin and Howard) was brought in to rewrite it. Ron Nyswaner (Smithereens, Mrs. Soffel) was then brought on to do further rewrites. Both screenwriters had worked with Demme, who was hot off the critical success of his breakthrough film Melvin and Howard. Like most everyone who saw that film, Hawn and her producing partner, legendary costume designer turned producer Anthea Sylbert, were impressed by the performance Demme got from Mary Steenburgen. They hired Demme for what was to be his first major studio movie. But the behind-the-scenes stories of this production are fraught. Apparently, Hawn and Demme clashed, and she was unhappy with his cut. The story goes that after Demme and editor Craig McKay had put the film together, Hawn hired the legendary script doctor Robert Towne to come in to write additional scenes, which Demme refused to shoot. He and McKay left the project, and the 30 minutes of new footage was presumably directed by 2^nd unit director Evelyn Purcell (who was Demme's ex-wife, making this saga even more interesting).

In the end, the final picture recut by Gib Jaffe bombed with critics and did poorly at the box office. But the released version, like so many unfairly maligned dramas of 1984, is far better than its reputation would have you believe. Only those blinded by the auteur theory would tell you, as Steve Vineberg of Sight & Sound did, that Demme's cut is "one of the best movies made by an American in the 80s," but the released cut is garbage. Vineberg called the whole mess "a Hollywood tragedy. It echoes what RKO did to Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons." That's a crazy statement. Demme was a director for hire on this project; he was hired by Hawn and her production company. And Warner Bros. was apparently unhappy with the film as Demme delivered it and wanted changes which Hawn agreed with.

The specifics of how things went down differ depending on who you listen to–not that it's all that easy to find firsthand accounts of the details of this production and post-production. We do know that Dowd took her name off the picture after being rewritten by so many others and used the pseudonym Rob Morton. One thing that's not too hard to find is a work-print reconstruction of Demme's original cut on the internet, and that's what I watched for this viewing. I'd always heard that Hawn and Warner Bros. wanted the story to be less of an ensemble piece and more of a vehicle for its star, but watching the first cut, we can see that almost nothing of Christine Lahti's storyline was removed when the film was recut. In both versions, this is as much the story of a friendship between two working women as it is a wartime romance between a married woman and a young man whose minor health issue prevented him from serving in the armed forces. There isn't much additional footage of the other women of the factory except for Holly Hunter, whose husband's death plays into the narrative a good deal more in the original cut.

The major difference between the original version and the final cut with its reshoots, aside from many of Demme's long oner-takes starting later, finishing earlier, and getting broken up with other coverage, is Hawn's character arc. In the original cut, Kay and Lucky have sex much earlier, and Kay's feelings of guilt and confusion are as much about the act of sleeping with someone who is not her husband as they are about falling for someone other than the man she's married to. The narrative progression that gets these two into bed and the argument scene that follows are far more traditional (some might say cliché) than the more matter-of-fact way things play out in the original. Also, the scenes in which her husband returns give Ed Harris more to play and make his character a little smarter with more agency (which feels very much like a studio change rather than one engineered by a star who wanted her role to be more central). The ending is a bit tidier as well, but it's not at all saccharine as some critics would have you believe.

Now that I've seen both versions, I probably like the original a tad more, but I do prefer the way the release version ends. As to the longer dolly and Steadicam shots, it's in the eye of the beholder as to whether these are an exquisite way to establish the period, setting, and characters, or unnecessary indulgences by a young director with access to a studio budget for the first time. Either way, the final release is not "choppy" as many claim. Demme shoots the dialogue with traditional framing rather than in the manner which would become his signature, with the actors looking directly into the camera. Many of the director's regular collaborators are already in place here, including McKay, Nyswaner, cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, and actors Charles Napier, Susan Peretz, Dick Miller (though he's cut out of the release version), and a cameo from Roger Corman. Demme's future producing partner Gary Goetzman also appears as a band leader.

The picture looks great, with wonderful period production design by Peter Jamison (Used Cars, Tin Men, At Close Range). The jazzy music also swings—look for Belinda Carlisle as a singer who shares the stage with Russell— who is very convincing as a horn player. It goes without saying that Russell and Hawn have wonderful chemistry. The two met while filming The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band, when he was seventeen, and she was twenty-three. But it was when they teamed up for this movie, a year after Russell had divorced his first wife, actress Season Hubley, and Hawn had been divorced for two years from her second husband, Bill Hudson. The two stars never married, but have stayed together for the rest of their lives, blending their families and having one child together, actor Wyatt Russell.

As wonderful as Kurt and Goldie are in the movie, the standout performance in Swing Shift comes from Lahti, who earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her performance. We don't often get to see Christine Lahti play a great role like Hazel, where she can really show what an amazing actress she is. Next to Running on Empty, this is probably Lahti's greatest movie role.