A close-knit group of young kids in Nazi Germany listen to banned swing music from the US. Soon dancing and fun lead to more difficult choices as the Nazis begin tightening the grip on Germany. Each member of the group is forced to face some tough choices about right, wrong, and survival.
Director: Thomas Carter
Stars: Robert Sean Leonard, Christian Bale, Frank Whaley, Barbara Hershey, Noah Wyle.
Otis Sallid ... choreographer
19 songs in the Soundtracks, several by or performed by Benny Goodman. Sing, Sing, Sing currently has no performer credit, but it's certainly their arrangement if not their performance; the credit on IMDb is how it appears in the end credits of the film.
Prior rating 7 on 2014-08-30; bumping it to 8 today.
This is very effective in showing how easy it would be to fall in with the Nazis, and how difficult to resist, much less fight them from within the country. Plus we get a lot of good music and dancing, although the dancing is edited a little too much.
The postscript before the credits says that swing kids were sent off to work camps.
Weird that CB (b. '74), who played the kid who was seduced by the propaganda (the middle one in the poster) is playing Dick Cheney in a film this year. He's shape-shifted a lot in those years.
First film director credit for TC, but he'd been directing tv since White Shadow ('79, 4 eps); only 5 film dir. credits so far.
distr. Buena Vista, dir. Carter; 8
