Just when (or long after) you thought there could be nothing new to tell about life under Hitler, along comes Thomas Carter's directorial debut to unearth a subterranean society of youthful rebels in pre-war Hamburg who listened to jazz (officially known as "nigger-kike music"), danced the jitterbug, spoke a secret language (quizzing one another from the Hepcat's Dictionary), adopted British fashions (umbrellas, mufflers, long hair), and disdained the brown-shirted, short-panted uniforms, if not necessarily the politics, of the Hitler Youth: our gang of swingers intervenes in the beating of a fellow longhair, only to find that the victim is not one of theirs, but an orthodox Jew. In unearthing this, the movie has done something else increasingly difficult: awakened sympathy for the young (better music than today's, better dancing, better clothing, a better cause). The cultural and historical tidbits -- the "Swing Heil" salutation, the relabeling of Benny Goodman 78s for surreptitious import, the long-gone phenomenon of the record-store listening booth: "That's Bunny Berigan on trumpet!" -- are sufficiently tasty to arouse a hunger for more. But once one of our heroes gets inducted into the Hitler Youth for disciplinary purposes, and another of them signs up to keep him company, the movie grows away from the swing scene and the source of its freshness, and toward a formulaic test of friendship and loyalty, with predictable results. Robert Sean Leonard, Christian Bale, Frank Whaley, and an uncredited Kenneth Branagh as another in the long line of prissy British Nazis. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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