Stephen Tobolowksy | Through the Shattered Lens

1984’s Swing Shift begins in 1941. Kay (Goldie Hawn) and Jack Walsh (Ed Harris) are a young married couple in California. At first glance, they seem to have the perfect life. Jack works all day and comes home and has a beer and tells his wife how much he loves her. Kay spends her day cleaning up around the house and when her husband comes home, she sits down next to him and tells him how much she loves him. Whenever their neighbor, Hazel (Christine Lahti), walks by their bungalow, Jack mutters that she’s a tramp. Hazel sings in a sleazy nightclub and dates a shady fellow named Biscuit (Fred Ward) and that’s just not what respectable people do!

When the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, Jack enlists in the Navy. Kay suggests that she could get a job while he’s gone but Jack is firm. He doesn’t want his wife working. However, after Jack leaves, Kay is motivated by both boredom and her patriotic duty to apply for a job in an armaments factory. With all of the men overseas fighting, their wives have been implored to do their part for the war effort.

Kay works the swing shift, along with Hazel and a trumpet player named Lucky (Kurt Russell). (Lucky sweetly declines to explain why he’s called Lucky.) Despite some early antagonism, Hazel and Kay becomes friends. Kay starts to come out of her shell, especially where Lucky is concerned. How will Jack react when he returns home?

The late director Jonathan Demme described directing Swing Shift as being one of the worst experiences of his career. Demme’s original cut of the film was an ensemble piece that was a drama with comedic moments. Star Goldie Hawn was reportedly not happy with Demme’s original cut and the film was essentially taken away from the director. Screenwriter Robert Towne was brought in to write some additional scenes. (Even before Towne was brought in, at least four writers had written a draft of the script and the screenplay itself was finally credited to a non-existent “Rob Morton.”) Some scenes were reshot. The film itself was reedited. The end result was a film that focused primarily on Kay and made her relationships with Hazel, Jack, and Lucky far less complex. Jonathan Demme walked away from the film, retaining his directorial credit but pointedly requesting that the film not be advertised as a “Jonathan Demme film.” Later in life, Demme declined to discuss either Swing Shift or the experience of working with Goldie Hawn.

Watching the studio cut of Swing Shift on Prime, I could understand many of Demme’s objections. It’s a film that’s full of good performances and some stylish visuals but it really doesn’t have much narrative momentum and, especially when it comes to Kay’s friendship with Hazel, it does feel like certain scenes are missing. Hazel is remarkably quick to forgive someone who she believes has spent years calling her a tramp. As well, there’s a lot of interesting characters in the background, many of whom are played by regular members of the Jonathan Demme stock company. (Charles Napier, Susan Peretz, Holly Hunter, Roger Corman, Lisa Peilkan, Sudie Bond, and Stephen Tobolowsky all have small roles.) Watching the film, one gets the feeling that they all probably had more to do in Demme’s original cut.

That said, I have to admit that I still enjoyed the studio cut of Swing Shift, flaws and all. A lot of that is due to the performances of Hawn and Russell. (Christine Lahti received a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her performance in this film. She’s okay, though I don’t really think she deserved a nomination over someone like Elizabeth Berridge in Amadeus or Tuesday Weld in Once Upon A Time In America.) Hawn does a wonderful job portraying Kay’s transformation from being a rather meek housewife to someone who can put a plane together without a moment’s hesitation. Hawn and Russell began their legendary romance on the set of Swing Shift and their chemistry is strong enough to carry the film over plenty of rough spots. At its best, Swing Shift inspired me to wonder what I would have done if I had been alive in the 1940s. Would I have ended up cutting my hair and working in a factory? Would I have waited at home from my ‘husband or sweetheart” (as the film refers to them) to come home? Or would I have run off with Lucky and followed him from town to town? Swing Shift is a good film that could have been great and, by many accounts, actually was great before it was recut. (Even with the reediting, enough of Demme’s trademark humanity comes through to make the scenes in the factory memorable.) In the end, Swing Shift isn’t perfect but I still enjoyed it.

An accident at a laboratory renders stock analyst Nick Holloway (Chevy Chase) invisible. CIA agent David Jenkins (Sam Neill) wants to recruit Nick to be an assassin but Nick doesn’t want to kill people. He just wants to make his date with Alice (Daryl Hannah). With Jenkins and his agents in pursuit, Nick flees to a beach house belonging to his friend George (Michael McKean) and tries to figure out what to do with his life now that no one can see him. Fortunately, Alice is staying at the beach house too. Nick and Alice fall in love but Jenkins is close behind.

Based on a science fiction novel by H.F. Saint, Memoirs of an Invisible Man started out as a vanity project for Chevy Chase, who felt that the film’s mix of comedy and drama would establish him as a serious actor. The project went through a series of directors, including Ivan Reitman and Richard Donner, but in the end no one wanted to work with the special effects necessary to create the impression of invisibility and, even more importantly, no one wanted to work with Chase. When the film was finally offered to John Carpenter, he was reluctant to do another studio film because of his bad experience with They Live. He finally agreed because it had been four years since his last film.

The special effects in Memoirs of an Invisible Man are still impressive and the chase scenes show off Carpenter’s abilities as an action director. The movie flopped with critics and audiences but that was not Carpenter’s fault. Carpenter keeps the story moving and gets good performances out of Sam Neill and even Daryl Hannah. The problem with the movie is that Chevy Chase is miscast as an action hero and he tries too hard to give a serious performance. Carpenter later said he wanted to add more comedy to the film and to emphasize Chase’s talent for physical comedy but Chase refused to do so. Chase also resented wearing the blue bodysuit that would be used to render him invisible onscreen and often removed the suit early, ruining whatever else Carpenter had planned to shoot during the day. You can add John Carpenter to the long list of directors who have said they will never work with Chevy Chase again.

One good thing did come out of Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Carpenter met and enjoyed working with Sam Neill. (Memoirs of an Invisible Man probably would have worked better in Neill and Chase had switched roles.) Neill would go on to star in Carpenter’s next film, In The Mouth of Madness.