Swing Kids (1993) on Netflix
In Hamburg in 1939, Peter Müller and Thomas Berger dance with their friends at the Bismarck, a club playing banned swing music. Caught stealing a radio, Peter must enroll in the Hitlerjugend.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb6.8/1018,421 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes56%
Trailer
Plot summary
Peter Müller and Thomas Berger are high school students in Hamburg in 1939. With their friends Arvid and Otto they go to the Bismarck, a swing club, and dance to music the regime has banned. Thomas ruins a prized record of Arvid's, and Arvid sends the friends away. To make amends, Peter and Thomas steal a radio from a bakery; Thomas escapes and Peter is caught. Herr Knopp, head of the local Gestapo, steps in for Peter, and in return Peter has to enroll in the Hitlerjugend. Thomas joins as well.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Swing Kids (1993)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Screenwriter Jonathan Marc Feldman based the film on a real movement of 1930s German teens who favoured American and British pop culture, hanging out in secret underground clubs where bands played swing and listening to acts like Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. At the time they were more often called "Schlurf".
- Kenneth Branagh appears repeatedly through the film, uncredited, in the role of SS-Sturmbannführer Knopp, and Martin Clunes turns up as a Bannführer.
- Roger Ebert gave the film one star out of four and called it "murky", asking: "If Hitler had encouraged the swing clubs, would the Kids have still developed problems with Nazism?" In a 2005 retrospective of his lowest-rated films he filed Swing Kids under "Sex, romance, music, drama and other crap".
- Swing Kids was a commercial failure, taking $5.6 million at the box office in the United States and Canada against a budget of $12 million.
