Thanks to the restoration of Swing High, Swing Low, we are at long last able to present this film in a 35mm print from the American Film Institute Collection at the Library of Congress. "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 bittersweet and intoxicating. Not many American pictures are better at seeing how lovers fall short of their own romanticism.... Stars rarely got to play failures in the confident days of Hollywood, but given that chance they looked like actors and characters." David Thomson