When It Absolutely Did Not Mean A Thing If You Couldn’t Swing That Thing- With Swing Kids In Mind

 

 

 

 

DVD Review

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Swing Kids, starring Christian Bales, Robert Sean Leonard, 1993

 

Sam Lowell was shocked when he thought about it later, shocked that any government, any society would go murderously crazy over some dance craze, although that may have been the least of it. He mentioned to his good friend Bart Webber in an e-mail urging him to either get the DVD Swing Kids from Netflix or see if it was in his local library in Carver which was well stocked in such DVDs that one could hardly imagine that when they were young that as much as parents, churchmen, politicians hated to see young people going crazy over rock and roll that displaying such interest might wind you up in jail, or a work camp. He reflected that as much as the later hip-hop nation and techno-pop were the current young’s way of breaking out that was equally true. Hell even the 1930s swing movement in this country, you know Benny Goodman, Count Basie and the like which is at the center of this drama was left in peace to do their faded thing. However in 1939 Germany as Hitler and his minions were readying to set the world on fire any such social diversity was verboten, yeah, forbidden.          

Later after Bart had ordered and seen the film though Netflix (it was not at the Carver Library although another film with Robert Sean Leonard in it who played Peter in Swing Kids, Dead Poets Society, was in stock and he took that out) he and Sam met at the Sunnyville Grille in Boston to have a couple of drinks as they occasionally did since both were now semi-retired and talked a bit about the impact of the film on them. About how maybe their own rock and roll beginning might have looked to the authorities under different circumstances and whether they would have had the stuff to buck society, buck the jailers like Peter did. About in the red scare Cold War night when things every day looked touch and go, looked scary every time they did the atomic bomb coming air raid drill which meant they had to duck under their seats and hold their heads, how they too needed to express themselves in a world they didn’t make. Express themselves with their own be-bop language, their endless listening to the latest rock and roll records on the transistor radios that were their life-blood, at Doc’s Drugstore jukebox, at the school dances and on American Bandstand. Express themselves in their dress and manners (long sideburns a la Elvis, snarls, and open neck shirts)        

So at the level of youthful rebellion both Sam and Bart could sympathize, could do more so under the wretched Nazi circumstances that Peter and his buddies, including main buddy Thomas (played by Christian Bales) who went weird before the whole thing was over, faced to be the Swing Kids, to breathe their own air. But the times in Germany did not permit such freedom and this film graphically depicts why in the end those who wanted to be free spirits, just wanted to be-bop-bop and swing, swing, swing wound up in work camps or impressed into the army.

The film follows the traumas and different ways that two young high school kids tried to express themselves, tried due to their own hubris to be swing kids by night and Hitler Youth by day. Thomas bought into the Nazi ideology in the end ready to do murder and mayhem to those who shortly before he was be-bopping with. Another buddy, Arvid, saw the writing on the wall, saw there was no air for him and his guitar in 1939 Nazi Germany and committed suicide. Others like Peter’s mother made every compromise to stay alive (with some reason since her husband had run afoul of the Nazis early on while protesting the expulsion of the Jews from the universities and had been broken), like Thomas’ father who just talked about how evil Hitler was (which wound him up in the Gestapo headquarters when Thomas ratted him out), and like many others just went along to get along.

Peter genetically made of sterner stuff defied the bastards. Said what every kid from every generation since kids became a separate social category would like to say-“yes, it don’t mean a thing if you can’t swing that thing.” Sam and Bart both wondered if they would say under those same circumstances “Roll over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news.”