SWING KIDS
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1993 Frank Maloney
SWING KIDS is a film directed by Thomas Carter, from a script by Jonathan Bard Manulis. It stars Robert Sean Leonard, Christian Bale, Frank Whaley, Barbara Hershey, and Kenneth Branagh (uncredited). Rated PG-13 for language, violence, and adult situations.
SWING KIDS, from Disney's Hollywood Pictures, is a film that was hyped, then dropped, then finally released. I don't know why -- if but someone in the know wants to write me, I'd be ever so appreciative. I wonder if perhaps the studio didn't lose its nerve for a while. After all, the subject and the setting -- American swing music and Nazi Germany on the eve of World War II -- are not the kind of contemporary references that are most likely to attract audiences, especially those younger audiences. Then, too, Disney was never able to sell its excellent, but ill-named, 1992 musical NEWSIES to a large audience. SWING KIDS is more of a drama cum dance picture, certainly not a musical, but there are similarities, not the least of which is the presence of Christian Bale in both. In NEWSIES, he was the hero, the voice of individual freedom against the monolithic power of the newspaper publisher. In SWING KIDS, he starts as one of the rebels against Nazism who later succumbs to its promises and lies. In both films, he has registered an excellent performance, with this most recent one being all the more interesting because of the mixed messages of his good-bad character, Thomas.
Thomas's friend, and later enemy, Peter, is the hero here. He is played by Robert Sean Leonard, who was the suicidal young actor in Peter Weir's DEAD POETS SOCIETY. Leonard turns in a wonderful performance as the confused young man, whose original drop-out opposition to the Nazis becomes confused, blurred, then clarified and hardened by his experiences as "an H.J. (Hitler Jugend, or Hitler Youth) by day and Swing Kid by night," as Thomas's formula put it.
The dilemma the boys find themselves in is strongly reminiscent of the Jewish boy who passes as an H.J. in EUROPA, EUROPA. This latter film made a much stronger case, and demonstration, of who the Nazis were, what they were doing, and what the moral and practical situation was for everyone else. Both films concern themselves with identity, with being co-opted by a seductive enemy, with the problem of staying neutral and uninvolved in a world that insists you take sides, with the problem of surviving. Peter is in no way as conflicted as the Salomon (in EUROPA, EUROPA), and SWING KIDS is in no way as gut-wrenching or mind-twisting as the German film. However, the American film is good, effective, and interesting in its own way. Not only does it provide several fine performances, including Frank Whaley as the intellectual and musical center of the Swing Kids and Barbara Hershey as Peter's frightened mother, as well as Kenneth Branagh as a slick, oleaginous Gestapo officer (and when you write tell me why Branagh chose to receive no credit for this part), but it also gives us several well integrated dance scenes and lots of wonderful swing music.
The dance numbers are naturalistic and exciting and often humorous. The young dancers display a kind of raw enthusiasm for jitterbug that is chaotic and as un-Nazi as anything one could imagine. Some reviewers have objected to making swing a metaphor for freedom, but to me it seems natural and earned. Anyone who experienced the first years of rock'n'roll knows how rebellious and in the broadest sense political mere music and dance can be. Certainly, anyone who was a part of the hippie "movement" knows that music and dress are not merely the symbols, but the very stuff, of rebellion and revolution. To the film's Nazis, swing was "Neger-Kike" music, Jewish Benny Goodman was banned and his records were relabeled Gene Krupa to get around a censor who hadn't caught to the fact that Count Basie wasn't the ruler of some country. But it was a rebellion-by-avoidance and it was unformed as a moral force or position; the Swing Kids could be as anti-semitic as the H.J.'s. The dramatic tension in the film is the development of swing as a moral idea, not merely adolescent rebellion against authority and responsibility.
The only problem I had with the film was its ending which seemed forced and unearned. That and the fact that I am still unclear when the Swings Kids were an historical fact or only the interesting invention of the writer; so that's the third thing you can write to me about, if you know. I can recommend SWING KIDS, even at full ticket price. It is an irresistible package of great music, good dancing, and an important story.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
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