Soft
power helped win the Cold War. For many behind the Iron Curtain, Voice of
America’s jazz DJ Willis Conover made a conclusive case for freedom with the
music of swing and bop. That toe-tapping music will do it every time. For one
hard-case North Korean POW, it is the tapping toes that win him over. Much to
his own surprise, he joins a camp tap dancing troupe in Kang Hyoung-chul’s Swing Kids (trailer here), which opens
today in New York.
Rho
Ki-soo is a true believer in Communism and King Kim Il-sung. His legendary brother
is even fiercer. However, Ki-soo is more adept at causing havoc, guerrilla-style.
That makes him particularly dangerous in a tinder box like the Geoje prison
camp. Often open conflict breaks out between the pro- and anti-communist POW
factions. Frankly, the large percentage of prisoners who want to stay in the South
should be cause for embarrassment to the Communist cause, but instead the North
has exploited the near anarchy of Geoje for propaganda purposes.
Then
Rho gets a good eyeful of Sgt. M. Jackson, a Broadway hoofer in his civilian life,
practicing his tap steps. Jackson is trying to mold two unlikely POWs and Yang
Pan-rae, a young civilian woman from town into some kind of ensemble, on the
orders of the camp commander, Gen. Roberts. The idea is to put on a show for
the media during the Red Cross’s Christmas visit. As fate would dictate, Rho
has tons of natural tap talent. He also craves the freedom he feels while
dancing, but the inherent Americanness of tap puts him in an awkward position
with his fanatical comrades.
Simply
in terms of music, Swing Kids does
not make a lot of sense, starting with the “swing” part, in this case, largely
equating with big band jazz, which was
definitely out of favor in the early 1950s. Honestly, the one person in the
camp most likely to have a copy of Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing,” featuring
Gene Krupa (Jackson’s tune of choice), would be old man Roberts. (Most GIs
would be listening to Frankie Laine and Doris Day.) As a hip cat, Jackson would probably be digging
bop—most likely Miles Davis. Frankly, even calling themselves the “Swing Kids”
sounds anachronistic.
Be
that as it was, it should be clearly stipulated the dance numbers in this Swing Kids (not to be confused with the 1993
film about jazz-listening teenagers in National Socialist Germany) are
surprisingly snappy and Kang and cinematographer Kim Ji-young shoot them in an
especially cinematic manner. On the other hand, the film attributes outright
war crimes to the American military, which is highly offensive (yes, I write as
the grandson of a Korean War veteran, who helped rebuild the South Korean
Marine Corps after the war). Regardless, the suggestion that an American
general would order MPs to indiscriminately murder Koreans is highly
problematic, to the point of libelous.
So,
it is hard to say what to make of this film. Jared Grimes (one of the choreographers
of After Midnight on Broadway) is
really terrific as Jackson and Park Hye-soo is quite endearing as the resilient
Yang. However, Do Kyung-soo’s Rho comes across as a smirky kid, who couldn’t
inspire rebellion in the world’s strictest Catholic School, while Ross Kettle
plays Roberts as the broadest martinet stereotype imaginable.
