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Swing Kids
Strong acting allows Swing Kids to overcome slow plot
By Joshua M. Andresen

Although it offers a rather unexciting plot, Swing Kids is amazing nonetheless. This well-researched film is wonderfully acted and the material is presented in a clear and meaningful manner.

The movie is set in 1939 Germany, where "swing kids" are a group of German youth who rebel against the Nazi movement. They wear their hair long, dress up in the latest English fashions, and dance to American swing music.

Peter Muller (Robert Sean Leonard) and Thomas Berger (Christian Bale) are best of friends and swing kids to the core. After getting caught for stealing a radio from a shop as a prank inspired by anti-Nazi sentiments, Peter is forced to join the Hitler Youth, a program meant to indoctrinate the German teenagers with the propaganda of the Third Reich. Thomas was involved in the prank as well, and joins to keep Peter company. They both believe that they can have everything: the power and freedom that comes with association with the Hitler Youth as well as the rebelliousness and freedom of attending swing kid parties at night. Eventually, they realize that they can not be mere members of the Nazi party without being parts of it.

Peter and Thomas go different ways in response to this conflict. Thomas starts to take the propaganda to heart while Peter becomes introspective and realizes the wrongness of even being involved with the Nazi party. This puts enormous strain on their friendship, creating the main conflict of the movie.

The acting in this movie is impeccable. Leonard definitely deserves an Oscar nomination for his role. His actions are always perfectly motivated, and the deeply introspective and moving scenes are heartfelt and believable. Bale and the supporting cast are excellent as well, topped off with a cameo by Kenneth Branagh.

The show-stopping dance sequences in this film are a real treat. The jitterbug dance steps are dazzling, with legs moving all over and women (and in one humorous role-reversal, a man) lifted and tossed all around. These scenes are pure fun, drawing a strong contrast between the nightly parties with swing music and the harsh reality that everyone lives during the day.

Despite this, the action of the film at times merely plods along. Though the acting performances and the dancing and the music entertain throughout, neither the plot nor the storyline offer any suspense or surprises. Everything that happens is expected or inevitable.

The story's material and the conflicts, however, are presented wonderfully. The audience views life from the perspective of Peter and Thomas, resulting in a believable sympathetic view of Naziism and a portrayal of the sadness of Nazi beliefs at the same time. The audience sees the world through young eyes, making the reactions of both Peter and Thomas understandable. This is the triumph of Swing Kids.

Copyright 1993 by The Tech. All rights reserved. This story was published on Friday, March 5, 1993. Volume 113, Number 11 The story was printed on page 8. This article may be freely distributed electronically, provided it is distributed in its entirety and includes this notice, but may not be reprinted without the express written permission of The Tech. Write to archive@the-tech.mit.edu for additional details.

Movie Magazine International
Swing Kids
By Monica Sullivan

The concept for the new Disney film "Swing Kids" evolved after screenwriter Jonathan Feldman saw a reference to the phenomenon "in an obscure historic journal". The National Socialist movement objected to American swing music because it was created by Black and Jewish artists, therefore German youths who championed swing represented a political danger. Or so this movie says and/or tries to say for 113 minutes.

There is some difficulty in verifying Feldman's view of 1939, not only because his obscure inspiration is unidentified in the press kit, but also because so much of his dialogue rings false for the period. There may have been a bundle of problems with the production of "Swing Kids", because Disney has held back its release for some time. We are expected to care in some way about the destruction of the friendship among three swing kids (Robert Sean Leonard, Christian Bale and Frank Whaley) but we don't because their friendship is only shown in a series of brief glimpses and in four lavish production numbers.

The film attempts to trace some sort of connection between the extremely well-documented plight of the Jews and the happy-go-lucky swing kids, but it doesn't, because the swing kids clearly had the opportunity to make a choice about their fate & the Jews did not. The swing kids are shown as disloyal, opportunistic, skin-deep and suicidal, while their Jewish counterparts are shown sketchily or in shadows. Clearly, the makers of this film wanted to make a big commercial movie about sexy Aryan kids with undeveloped consciences dancing up a storm on their way to their individual destinies, but all they've come up with is yet another well-intentioned flop. Who was this movie made for? Adults, who'll squirm at its wobbly narrative and hokey finale? Teenagers, who are supposed to identify with Robert Sean Leonard's confused character, maybe, or feel sorry for the self-destructive music buff played by Frank Whaley? Nope, "Swing Kids" is a mess from start to finish, riddled with retroactive guilt, some lively dancing and mostly-good actors who act their little hearts out for first-time director Thomas Carter.

For counterpoint, check out a little 1943 exploitation film Edward Dmytryk made for $205,000 at R.K.O. studios: "Hitler's Children" with Bonita Granville and Tim Holt. "Hitler's Children" was no masterpiece, but it wisely stuck to basics: Romeo and Juliet versus the swastika. The formula worked well enough to earn back its budget sixteen times over. (Note: There is no sex and not much love in "Swing Kids".) Why did a cheap little love story like "Hitler's Children" attract more audiences than "Top Hat", "Little Women" and "King Kong"? Check it out on video and find out.

Chicago Sun-Times
Swing Kids
03/05/1993
By Roger Ebert

"Swing Kids" involves a very small footnote to a very large historical event. In Nazi Germany in 1939, we learn, while Hitler was rounding up Jews and launching World War II, a small group of kids wore their hair long and danced to the swing music of such banned musicians as Benny Goodman and Count Basie. Occasionally they got into fights with the brownshirts of the Hitler Youth brigades. If the Swing Kids had evolved into an underground movement dedicated to the overthrow of Nazism, we might be onto something here. But no. A title card at the end of the film informs us that some of the kids died at the hands of the Nazis, and others were forced into the German Army and killed in battle, but that some survived, and after the war there were still Swing Kids in Germany. Isn't that terrific? No doubt they continue even to this day, celebrating their 70th birthdays by boogieing to the "Bugle Call Rag." Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned, could have been the original Swing Kid.

One of the peculiar elements of this film is that the Kids don't seem very political. The screenplay is so murky, indeed, that I was never sure whether the Kids hated the Hitler Youth lads because they were Nazis, or simply because they didn't swing. At a time when civilization was crashing down around their ears and Hitler was planning the Holocaust, it doesn't make them particularly noble that they'd rather listen to big bands than enlist in the military. Who wouldn't? In an ambiguous scene early in the film, the Swing Kids hear that Hitler Youth types are beating up on a fellow Kid in an alley. They race to the rescue, beat the Youth members to a pulp, and then discover the victim was not a Swing Kid but a Jew. They stand around confusedly while the hero's little brother explains that, gee, he "thought it was a Swing Kid." How do the Swing Kids feel about Hitler's campaign against the Jews? Essentially, they'd like to look the other way - to keep on dancing.

To excuse their indifference, the movie does not much emphasize what the Nazis were doing at the time. We see a few Jewish men beaten or carted away, mostly in long shots, and a few "Traitor" signs on shopfronts, but until the very end of the film the Swing Kids aren't much moved - and even then some of them become loyal Nazis. It is typical of the film that although in a few shots you can glimpse the stars that Jews were forced to wear on their clothing, the movie never points them out, or explains them. In an attempt to show Nazi propaganda at work, the film does include some of Hitler's anti-Semitic propaganda, which is reproduced in such great detail and with such fidelity to its sources that I grew uncomfortable. The racist remarks against Jews in the movie are allowed to go unanswered - except by the dire implication, of course, that if it weren't for Jews, you wouldn't have the music of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. The movie does show a gradual change of heart on the part of Peter (Robert Sean Leonard), a Swing Kid whose musician father has already been packed away by the Nazis, and whose mother (Barbara Hershey) has accepted the new order and has dinner guests like a top Gestapo official (Kenneth Branagh). Peter hangs out with a group of fellow swing fans, trading records and trivia questions. Eventually, like some of the others, he ends up wearing a brown shirt - but he can't stomach the Nazis, and is last seen being trucked away to oblivion, the little brother waving forlornly in the street.

One can only speculate on what kinds of compromises went into the making of this film. Was a decision made at some point to play up the swing music and play down the Nazi atrocities, to improve the film's box office chances? Was the plot deliberately skewed to pander to the movie youth audience? Did anyone consciously decide that today's kids would like a movie about young German music fans of the 1930s, but would be turned off by too much politics? I can't say. There are moments here where the movie seems to believe Hitler was bad, not because he mapped genocidal madness, but because he wouldn't let the Swing Kids dance all night. If Hitler had encouraged the swing clubs, would the Kids have still developed problems with Nazism? Thoughts come to mind about the deck band on the Titanic.

Washington Post
Swing Kids
By Rita Kempley
March 05, 1993

"Swing Kids" is a bad idea whose time has not come. It's "Cabaret" as Col. Klink might have envisioned it, a nutty anti-Nazi a go-go for teenagers, set to American music.

It's Hamburg 1939, and swing music is strictly verboten. The movie opens with a splashy number in a crowded cafe, where the local hepcats defy the Establishment by jitterbugging to American music in faddish English clothes. The filmmakers apparently see them as political rebels when they're just juiced adolescents (curiously blase about girls).

Peter Muller (Robert Sean Leonard) and Thomas Berger (Christian Bale) are wild about Benny Goodman and Count Basie as well as other black and Jewish American artists banned by the fascists. The cocky, fun-loving Swing Kids are a favorite target of their peers in the Hitler Youth.

Peter and Thomas, both 17, have resisted joining this dour group, but they are caught playing a prank and compelled to sign up. Though they've seen many friends converted by peer pressure and propaganda, the friends naively believe they are immune to the group's machinations. To Peter's despair, the weaker-willed Thomas is soon selling his own father to the Gestapo, baiting Swing Kids and bullying pathetic cripples.

Peter is made of sterner stuff, like Kevin Bacon in "Footloose." They can take their Bavarian slap dance and shove it -- he's going to swing heil. Sure, he could join the underground, stay home and help Frau Muller (Barbara Hershey) raise his younger brother. But he chooses a perfectly idiotic course in keeping with the Klinkian nature of the story.

"Swing Kids" is another daft idea from Disney on the order of "Alive," the movie about really bad airline food. It's a moralistic muddle with only one message: If Disney wants to make movies about Germans, it should restrict its efforts to German shepherds.

Magill's Survey of Cinema
Swing Kids
By Kirby Tepper

Set in 1939 Germany, this musical drama centers on three teenage friends--Peter (Robert Sean Leonard), Thomas (Christian Bale), and Arvid (Frank Whaley)--who adore swing music and who are each forced to take a stand regarding the rising tide of Nazism.

Summary: An obscure article in a historical journal led to the development of this film about the struggle for the hearts and souls of German youth as the Nazi Party took over Germany. "Swing Kids" were real-life young people who immersed themselves in American swing music and culture in order to rebel against the oppressive tide of Nazism.

This film is a wonderful fictional tale that perfectly captures the rebelliousness and the danger of the Swing Kids of 1939 Germany. What at first appears to be a Hollywood version of the terror of the early Nazi years turns into a serious, engrossing, and thought-provoking film about morality, innocence, friendship, and the survival of individualism in the face of oppression.

In 1939 Hamburg, Peter Muller (Robert Sean Leonard) and his friends Thomas (Christian Bale) and the handicapped Arvid (Frank Whaley) are Swing Kids, saturating themselves in American swing music and slang. They enjoy their obsession in secret, though, because the music of Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Count Basie, and others is illegal in Germany because these artists are African American or Jewish. "They probably think Count Basie is the head of a country," says Peter of the German authorities. Peter and his friends dress in American and British dress, with long hair they copy from American cowboy films. They dance the reckless dances of swing at underground cafes that are regularly raided by the Hamburg police and the Hitler Youth. They find Benny Goodman records through underground networks that have changed the name to "Gene and the Band" to avoid the German censors. Cab Calloway's Hipster's Dictionary is their bible, and they test themselves to see if they know the latest American slang. They spend their time laughing, playing, and dancing.

Their innocent rebelliousness does not last long, however, as the Hitler Youth movement becomes a pervasive presence in Germany. Peter is forced to join to protect himself, his mother (Barbara Hershey), and his younger brother, Willi (David Tom), after a childish prank gets him in trouble with the law. Thomas joins the youth movement with Peter as a lark, saying that nothing will break them apart. So they decide to become Hitler Youth by day, Swing Kids by night.

Early in the film, when one of the boy's friends joins the Hitler Youth, Arvid says that "no one who likes swing could become a Nazi." He is wrong: Thomas succumbs to the Nazi propaganda, and Peter struggles with agonizing choices between ignoring the Nazi immorality or joining it blindly. The film's central conflict rests on Peter's dilemma and his unfolding understanding of the Nazi Party.

Jonathan Marc Feldman has written a rich, textured screenplay in which all of the character's desires and fears are made clear and their actions lead the audience to follow the story with great interest. Director Thomas Carter, the Emmy-winning creator of the television series Equal Justice, makes his feature film debut with strength, clarity, and style. Although Swing Kids may not be full of surprising plot twists, it is full of surprising talent and panache, from the letter-perfect costumes of Jenny Beavan to the sumptuous photography of Jerzy Zielinski, reminiscent of the best of Technicolor.

The photographic evocation of Technicolor does not appear to be a coincidence, as the entire film has a distinctive and authentic 1930's feel. The innocence and naivete of the young people is echoed in the film's imagery, which is reminiscent of a period of filmmaking in which innocence reigned. The dancing is soulful, the dialogue is eloquent, and the actors are young and eager. The film has a quality similar to some of the so-called Brat Pack films of the 1980's, such as St. Elmo's Fire (1985) or The Breakfast Club (1985), in which a group of intense young actors--all of whom are unknown but seemingly destined to achieve greater success in their film careers--appears in a film about friends forever changed by life events. In some ways, the film also has a Capraesque quality, a term that has come to describe a film in which the heroes are heroic and morality and immorality are easily distinguished. One scene in Swing Kids evokes a brief memory of Jimmy Stewart in It's A Wonderful Life (1946), as Peter dances gawkily and sweetly for the girl he fancies, Evey (Tushka Bergen).

For that moment, Robert Sean Leonard as Peter shares the same mixture of passion and awkwardness as Stewart's George Bailey.

Indeed, Leonard is marvelous as Peter. This is a film about the need for young people to belong to something, and Leonard shows Peter's need to be part of something meaningful to escape the dreariness of his family's tragedies at the hands of the Nazis. Leonard is a veteran of many fine performances, most notably as the troubled youth in Dead Poets Society (1989). He expertly displays personal conviction and inner conflict without a trace of disingenuousness.

The other youths are splendid as well. The standouts are Christian Bale as the cocky Thomas, who changes from an engaging young rogue to a menacing pawn of the Nazis, and Frank Whaley as Arvid, the most dedicated of the Swing Kids. Bale, who starred in Steven Spielberg's Empire Of The Sun (1987), proves himself to be a wonderful dancer in the early dance sequences. He has an ease and a distinctive presence that make him thoroughly believable as Thomas and thoroughly impressive as an actor. Whaley is similarly outstanding in what is arguably the film's showiest role. Arvid is an obsessive musician whose steely rebelliousness gets him into trouble but never causes him to give up that in which he believes. The fact that Arvid is handicapped is symbolic of the scores of people who were handicapped by their physical vulnerability to the Nazis but who never allowed their minds or souls to be taken over. Whaley's Arvid serves as a determined, even overbearing conscience at a time in history when a conscience was desperately needed. At one critical point, he pulls out Cab Calloway's Hipster's Dictionary and says to Thomas, "quiz time...`got your glasses on.' It means, `you don't know who your friends are.'" This line describes the essence of the film. The youth in the early years of Nazism had to "put their glasses on" in order to follow the Nazi Party. Arvid and Thomas are representative of those who either retained their moral integrity or succumbed to the propaganda. That Peter spends much of the film caught in the middle emphasizes the dangerous truth that, ultimately, one had to choose sides.

The inclusion of the character of Peter's younger brother symbolizes hope in the film. Some filmgoers may see this character as a sentimental way to wring emotion from Peter and from the audience. He represents the notion, however, that there will always be more children who are in danger under a totalitarian regime, because they might succumb to propaganda or be oppressed by it. In addition, the absence of Peter's father represents the need of the German people to find a patriarchal figure on whom to pin their hopes at the time of Adolf Hitler's rise to power.

Criticisms of this film often centered on its creators' decision to have the characters speak without German accents. For many, it hurt the credibility of the story because the actors make no effort to change their speech patterns and because, at times, the dialogue has a contemporary feel. Ultimately, however, the decision seems to have been a good one for the film, as uneven and stereotypical accents would prove less believable.

Swing Kids was not a box-office success, perhaps because of the film's original marketing strategy. The trailer led audiences to believe that the film is a musical about Hitler's Germany, perhaps destroying the film's credibility before it ever opened to general release.

It is not a musical, however, and only a small portion of screen time is devoted to the dance segments. Choreographer Otis Sallid has created a series of dances using the jitterbug (and other period dances) that are both unruly and wild, yet beautifully choreographed and exciting to watch. He is able to make the jitterbug look dangerous and contemporary, reminding the audience that it is always young people who pose the strongest threat to a society's establishment. They bring new perspectives to culture and thought through their music and dance, and the audience is symbolically reminded that it was not only in Hitler's Germany that people in control of government tried--and still try--to suppress the emerging power and confidence of youth.

Review Sources:
Entertainment Weekly. March 12, 1993, p. 42.
The Hollywood Reporter. March 3, 1993, p. 10.
Los Angeles Times. March 5, 1993, p. F4.
The New York Times. March 5, 1993, p. B8.
Variety. March 4, 1993, p. 4.

Achtung Babies: Swing Kids Robert Sean Leonard, Chrisitian Bale
By Owen Gleiberman
Entertainment Weekly, March 12, 1993

If you've seen the ads for Swing Kids and think it looks like some sort of grotesquely upbeat ersatz-'40s musical about fresh-faced German youths grinnin' and hoofin' their way through the rise of Nazism (Swingtime for ^ Hitler?), the movie will probably take you by surprise. The hero, a svelte teen maverick named Peter (Robert Sean Leonard), does adore big-band jazz and spends many an evening at the Cafe Bismarck, a candy-colored dance hall where young couples toss each other around with electric abandon. The movie, which takes off from actual accounts of German teenagers who rebelled through their love of swing, treats the music-appropriately-as the rock & roll of its era: the sound of freedom. The dancing, for all its gymnastic splendor, comes off as wilder, sexier, less meticulously choreographed than it usually does in Hollywood swing-dance sequences.

Nevertheless, most of Swing Kids has nothing to do with swing. Set in 1939, just as the Nazi juggernaut was reaching full force, the movie is a somber, smoothly crafted drama about a wily adolescent who senses there's something rotten going on in his country but can't quite put a finger on it.

Suddenly, everyone Peter knows-buddies, schoolmates, even his widowed mother (Barbara Hershey)-is turning into a brainwashed Third Reich partisan. The most effective aspect of the movie is the way it portrays the Nazis less as goose-stepping monsters than as an insidious cult that alternately seduces and bullies the civilian population. At the behest of a Gestapo official (Kenneth Branagh, employing his thin-lipped hauteur for silken malice), Peter dons the fascist Boy Scout uniform of the Hitler Youth. But he isn't taken in.

Robert Sean Leonard, a Dead Poets Society alum, has a face that grows more interesting the longer you look at it. He's Aryan handsome but with a touch of high-cheekboned androgyny. Following the rise of Nazism through his nervous, gimlet eyes, we seem, at moments, to be caught up in some grim historical version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Still, I have a question: Why on earth was Swing Kids made? It's doubtful a picture like this one could hold out much commercial appeal for young moviegoers. Raised on pop nihilism, fashion, and the eternal cult of the now, most of them feel at a crucial remove from such antique phenomena as swing dancing and, you know, World War II. As for anyone older, the movie, okay as it is, will seem too derivative to be very exciting. At this point, you'd have to put a far more audacious spin on the Nazi era to create a drama that could honestly be described as eye-opening. B-

Swing Time for Hitler: German Teens Rebel
By Jack Mathews.
Newsday, March 5, 1993

* * 1/2 (two and a half stars) SWING KIDS. (PG-13)
Asometimes powerful, sometimes silly, excursion into the big band jazz subculture of Nazi Germany. With Robert Sean Leonard, Christian Bale, Kenneth Branagh. Directed by Thomas Carter. At area theaters.

ON THE GRAY streets outside, plainclothes gestapo, uniformed SS and roaming Hitler Youth squads are pushing the people of 1939 Germany into a growing state of terror. Jews are being harassed, assaulted and robbed, sympathizers are being watched or tortured, and Jewish women awaiting the return of arrested husbands are instead being handed packages containing wedding rings and ashes.

Inside the Cafe Bismarck, however, the lights are bright and the joint is jumping. On stage, a band is re-creating the verboten sounds of American swing greats Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and the dance floor is a hot patch of fair-skinned, jitterbugging German youths.

If there has been a serious movie with a greater contrast of moods than "Swing Kids," it doesn't come to mind, and it is at the extremes where first-time director Thomas Carter and screenwriter Jonathan Marc Feldman squander their wonderful story concept, as well as the exceptional performances of its two youthful stars, Robert Sean Leonard and Christian Bale. It's a great idea to use the jazz subculture to explore the conflicting pull of politics and music on Germans coming of age at the peak of Hitler's madness, to tap into a group of apolitical youths bonded by their love for the "Neger / Kike" music that the conformist state has deemed "perverse" and "dangerous."

Like many of America's "Flower Children" of the '60s, Germany's swing kids were motivated by nothing so much as having a good time, and freestyle jitterbugging was simply more fun than the waltz. To turn their appreciation for American music into some sort of political credo - "Swing Heil!" is their salute, and when things get really tough, they break into a few bars of "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing" - is a pure Hollywood conceit.

The frustrating thing about "Swing Kids" is that it cuts back and forth, with jarring frequency, between the screenwriter's fantasies and the gloomy realities of Nazism. Whether their passions were for swing or Jewish literature or anything else outside the state's interests, the Reich did not long tolerate eccentricities, even among youths. "Swing Kids" addresses that issue through the deteriorating relationships between three teenage friends: Peter (Robert Sean Leonard), whose father had died for his Jewish sympathies, Thomas (Christian Bale), the calculating son of affluent Germans, and Arvid (Frank Whaley), a crippled guitarist and jazz scholar who is deemed inferior by the Hitler Youth and some of his own friends because of his handicap.

It is quickly apparent which political direction the three characters will take, and what should be the film's most dramatic sequences are sabotaged by cliches and predictability. On the other extreme, the dance scenes have the intentional artifice of Andy Hardy movies. You can't complain about the music - I'm buying the soundtrack tomorrow! - but hearing the full-throated Benny Goodman version of "Sing, Sing, Sing" come out of an orchestra small enough to carpool to the club in a Volkswagen van is hard to overlook. The dancing scenes themselves, choreographed by Otis Sallid, who did the lindy numbers for Spike Lee's "Malcolm X," are so loose-limbed and hyper-energized, it looks like somebody spiked the schnapps with LSD.

Carter, a successful director of TV dramas, obviously wanted to heighten the comparison between the passionate abandon kids feel on a dance floor with the goose-stepping discipline of the Hitler Youth. A little subtlety would have served that purpose much better. Even while we marvel at the silliness of "Swing Kids," however, it is often powerfully moving. Robert Sean Leonard is extraordinarily convincing as Peter, who loses his political innocence while trying to protect his frightened mother (Barbara Hershey) and getting to know the true nature of the gentle-mannered gestapo (an uncredited Kenneth Branagh) who moves into their lives.

In the end, you're left saddened not so much by the story being told, but by its botched telling. To quote another song from the movie, sometimes "Tain't whatcha do, it's the way thatcha do it."

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