IMDb RATING
5.9/10
5.5K
YOUR RATING
A woman finds romance when she takes a job at an aircraft plant to help make ends meet after her husband goes off to war.A woman finds romance when she takes a job at an aircraft plant to help make ends meet after her husband goes off to war.A woman finds romance when she takes a job at an aircraft plant to help make ends meet after her husband goes off to war.
- Nominated for 1 Oscar
- 1 win & 3 nominations total
Danny Darst
- Deacon
- (as Daniel Dean Darst)
Chris Lemmon
- Lt. O'Connor
- (as Christopher Lemmon)
- Director
- Writers
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaIn an early scene, Ed Harris, clad only in a towel wrapped around his waist, plops down on a chair. For a split second, his genitals are fully exposed. This scene somehow evaded the censors (and in a PG-rated film) and in the first video release, the scene is intact. The scene has now disappeared from subsequent releases. However, it is included on the print shown on Turner Classic Movies.
- GoofsWhen the service men are boarding the bus, and Kay is saying goodbye to her husband, a man appears with a megaphone to announce the bus is departing. His megaphone is a self-contained transistor one which was not available in 1941.
- Quotes
Documentary Narrator: Each returning serviceman will get his job back when the war is won. And you girls and women, you'll be going home. Back to being housewives and mothers as you promised to do when you came to work with us. Your lives will return to normal.
- Crazy creditsOpening credits are shown over old, black and white photos.
- Alternate versionsCBS edited 5 minutes from this film for its 1987 network television premiere.
- SoundtracksSomeone Waits For You
Performed by Carly Simon
Produced by Richard Perry
Music by Peter Allen
Lyrics by Will Jennings
Featured review
Goldie Hawn is married to Ed Harris, but then WWII comes along and Harris is off. Hawn takes a job in an aircraft manufacturing plant to help fill up her lonely days, and she ends up befriending her nightclub singer neighbor Christine Lahti, who works at the same plant, and has an affair with co-worker Kurt Russell.
I suppose it easy to look at this as a lightweight slice-of-WWII nostalgia comedy, but I would suggest this is an actively bad film. Since I know about the conflict between Demme and Hawn and that this cut of the film is drastically different from his (he apparently considered an Alan Smithee credit, which I think he should have done), it's hard to say how much my opinion is coloured by this knowledge. That said, looked at fairly impassively, this is a bad film that fails to build meaningful characters and ends up having nothing to say about Hawn's war time experiences.
If you follow Demme's career arc, you can tell that we wouldn't have made a film filled with side character's that get virtually no screen time, but just abruptly pop up for big moments that mean nothing since we know nothing about them. He wouldn't have Harris mysteriously just know about Hawn's affair. Most crucially, he wouldn't make a film where Hawn's affair with Russell and friendship with Lahti culminate in her ending up as exactly the same person she was when the film started.
I think it's fairly clear that Hawn got cold feet about playing a woman who experience of independence lead to her having an extramarital affair that she didn't regret, so she recut the film to make her more remorseful and just return to Harris and the status quo. It ends up robbing her character of growth and the film of meaning.
I suppose it easy to look at this as a lightweight slice-of-WWII nostalgia comedy, but I would suggest this is an actively bad film. Since I know about the conflict between Demme and Hawn and that this cut of the film is drastically different from his (he apparently considered an Alan Smithee credit, which I think he should have done), it's hard to say how much my opinion is coloured by this knowledge. That said, looked at fairly impassively, this is a bad film that fails to build meaningful characters and ends up having nothing to say about Hawn's war time experiences.
If you follow Demme's career arc, you can tell that we wouldn't have made a film filled with side character's that get virtually no screen time, but just abruptly pop up for big moments that mean nothing since we know nothing about them. He wouldn't have Harris mysteriously just know about Hawn's affair. Most crucially, he wouldn't make a film where Hawn's affair with Russell and friendship with Lahti culminate in her ending up as exactly the same person she was when the film started.
I think it's fairly clear that Hawn got cold feet about playing a woman who experience of independence lead to her having an extramarital affair that she didn't regret, so she recut the film to make her more remorseful and just return to Harris and the status quo. It ends up robbing her character of growth and the film of meaning.
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Details
- Release date
- Country of origin
- Language
- Also known as
- Swing Shift - Liebe auf Zeit
- Filming locations
- Long Beach, California, USA(bicycling sequence)
- Production companies
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
Box office
- Budget
- $15,000,000 (estimated)
- Gross US & Canada
- $6,650,206
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $2,270,136
- Apr 15, 1984
- Gross worldwide
- $6,650,206
- Runtime1 hour 40 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.85 : 1
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