Called the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, this all-female, multi-racial swing band barnstormed the country during the post-Depression years. As an integrated group in the South, the International Sweethearts traveled, ate and slept in their tour bus, because segregation laws and rampant prejudice made other arrangements often illegal and sometimes downright dangerous. This documentary places the band in an historical context, exploring the changed social climate of the late Thirties and Forties. Anything but a novelty, this 16-piece ensemble played hot jazz. Yet ability and popularity didn't override the dangers of a segregated South. Roz Cron, a white saxophonist, recalls, "It was absolutely necessary that I pass as black all the time. We used different kinds of make-up and it turned my skin orange. We tried everything." That white members of the band were also the object of race hatred revealed this discriminatory impulse to be, ironically, indiscriminate. Rousing performance footage of the International Sweethearts gives Schiller and Weiss' documentary a rhythm you can't beat.