![]() Kay, a simple woman who has never felt conflicted in regards to her mundane life, finds herself at a crossroads with herself not wanting to sit by passively as a war goes on, she hastily takes it upon herself to get a job at the local armaments factory and make herself useful. In "Swing Shift," Goldie Hawn, giving one of her best performances, portrays Kay Walsh, a housewife whose husband, Jack (Ed Harris), has decided to join the Navy after hearing of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Miniver" and "The Best Years of Our Lives," which weren't afraid of WWII realities but still possessed a sweetness hard not to succumb to. It isn't unlike an uplifting women's picture as I watched its frothiness move along with assured loveliness, I was reminded of such influential pictures as "Mrs. ![]() So "Swing Shift" finds a delicate balance between glorious sentimentality and softened realism, so conspicuous in its design and tone that even hard truths that were certainly part of wartime have an unmistakable glamorization to them. I, like most young adults who never had to face the inequalities of the time, am infatuated with 1940s America in concept, not for what it actually was. We like to romanticize the 1940s, to forget about their sexism, racism, classism, and other oppressors, because it is perhaps the pinnacle era by which we most often point to as being the "good old days," and perhaps because cultural artifacts of the time wear the handsome perfection of a Norman Rockwell painting. War Bonds are advertised as often as the casual Lucky Strike. Men are fighting overseas, but America is stronger than ever. Teenagers go on dates in ice cream parlors where they sit at the bar in chromium swivel chairs, bashfully turning the other way as their date whispers a rose-colored compliment in their ear. A Technicolor, Betty Grable musical is playing at a nearby theatre. ![]() Innocent packs of kids play baseball in their school's dugout after school. When bombarded with iconography of the time, certain images, sounds, textures, wash over me, affected by consumption of the good, not the bad, and not living in the decade myself.īrass music softly plays on radios in white-picketed, suburban homes that keep their doors unlocked throughout the night. Not for its societal norms, cultural standpoints, or even the war itself, mind you, but for its more artificial, material offerings. ![]() I think everyone has been faced with a very real nostalgia for WWII era America. ![]()
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