Goldie Hawn is married to Ed Harris, but then WWII comes along and Harris is off. Hawn takes a job in an aircraft manufacturing plant to help fill up her lonely days, and she ends up befriending her nightclub singer neighbor Christine Lahti, who works at the same plant, and has an affair with co-worker Kurt Russell.
I suppose it easy to look at this as a lightweight slice-of-WWII nostalgia comedy, but I would suggest this is an actively bad film. Since I know about the conflict between Demme and Hawn and that this cut of the film is drastically different from his (he apparently considered an Alan Smithee credit, which I think he should have done), it's hard to say how much my opinion is coloured by this knowledge. That said, looked at fairly impassively, this is a bad film that fails to build meaningful characters and ends up having nothing to say about Hawn's war time experiences.
If you follow Demme's career arc, you can tell that we wouldn't have made a film filled with side character's that get virtually no screen time, but just abruptly pop up for big moments that mean nothing since we know nothing about them. He wouldn't have Harris mysteriously just know about Hawn's affair. Most crucially, he wouldn't make a film where Hawn's affair with Russell and friendship with Lahti culminate in her ending up as exactly the same person she was when the film started.
I think it's fairly clear that Hawn got cold feet about playing a woman who experience of independence lead to her having an extramarital affair that she didn't regret, so she recut the film to make her more remorseful and just return to Harris and the status quo. It ends up robbing her character of growth and the film of meaning.
I suppose it easy to look at this as a lightweight slice-of-WWII nostalgia comedy, but I would suggest this is an actively bad film. Since I know about the conflict between Demme and Hawn and that this cut of the film is drastically different from his (he apparently considered an Alan Smithee credit, which I think he should have done), it's hard to say how much my opinion is coloured by this knowledge. That said, looked at fairly impassively, this is a bad film that fails to build meaningful characters and ends up having nothing to say about Hawn's war time experiences.
If you follow Demme's career arc, you can tell that we wouldn't have made a film filled with side character's that get virtually no screen time, but just abruptly pop up for big moments that mean nothing since we know nothing about them. He wouldn't have Harris mysteriously just know about Hawn's affair. Most crucially, he wouldn't make a film where Hawn's affair with Russell and friendship with Lahti culminate in her ending up as exactly the same person she was when the film started.
I think it's fairly clear that Hawn got cold feet about playing a woman who experience of independence lead to her having an extramarital affair that she didn't regret, so she recut the film to make her more remorseful and just return to Harris and the status quo. It ends up robbing her character of growth and the film of meaning.