Swing Fever (1943)

(On Cable TV, July 2020) The history of film is rife with unlikely movie stars, and you can watch Swing Fever for one particularly striking example. In many ways, it’s a rather silly musical comedy film in which a country man with supernatural “evil eye” powers comes to the city to sell a music piece, but gets embroiled into a story mixing swing music and boxing promoters. That’s not a bad excuse to see a few swing numbers and some middle-of-the-road comedy. As a wartime film, it’s big on supporting the troops and not challenging anything and featuring simple musical numbers. The rather wonderful Lena Horne plays herself in a disconnected number that is shot like a bluesy music video. But the big surprise here for uninitiated viewers such as myself is the lead actor, playing a character so nebbish that he would be featured as a minor comic character in other movies. But in Swing Fever, he takes centre stage complete with heroics, superpowers and getting the blonde girl at the end. Well, that actor turns out to be Kay Kyser, a rather popular band leader who was under contract for MGM at the time. The star power explains some of the leading role indulgences—in playing his band leader persona, however, much of the effect is lost on twenty-first century viewers. Still, it’s entertaining enough—the mixture of swing music and manly boxing (with some assorted criminal shenanigans) ensured that it was the closest thing to an all-quadrant crowd-pleaser for audiences at the time. Blandly-titled Swing Fever isn’t a great or overly memorable film (although the Horne number is worth a mention), but it’s entertaining enough, and an interesting representative of your wholly average early-1940s movie musical.