"Not many people seem to know Swing High, Swing Low; and yet as Mitchell Leisen's reputation is restored, this may stand as his best picture and one of the most touching romances of the 1930s. It traces the love and break-up of a hairdresser/singer (Carole Lombard) and a brilliant, feckless trumpeter, 'Skid' Johnson (Fred MacMurray, so good, so weak and desperate that the one film makes one reconsider his whole career). In terms of liquid, shifting style, it is a link between von Sternberg's creation of exotic settings at Paramount and the approach of film noir. From the startling opening, in which the world appears to consist of different levels that pass in the morning, through the evocation of a lustrous, raffish Panama, there is a fusion of music, movement, light and shadow that is bitter-sweet and intoxicating. Not many American pictures are better at seeing how lovers fall short of their own romanticism.
"With the best performances by Lombard and MacMurray, this could have settled for being a starry vehicle. But the couple excel just because Leisen has urged them into a vulnerable ordinariness and set them down in a ring of sombre, watchful people--Jean Dixon and Charles Butterworth as friends who try not to notice disaster coming; Cecil Cunningham, riveting as a cafe boss; Dorothy Lamour, lovely, but unusually cunning as the other woman; and even a glimpse of Anthony Quinn on the make. Stars rarely got to play failures in the confident days of Hollywood, but given that chance they looked like actors and characters." David Thomson