Saturday Night Fever

Quite some time ago during one of the free preview weekends, I had the opportunity to record both Urban Cowboy and Saturday Night Fever. Since both star John Travolta, I wanted to hold off on doing Saturday Night Fever until a reasonable amount of time after I had done the post on Urban Cowboy. In any case, Saturday Night Fever is on overnight tonight at 12:35 AM (that's still Saturday night, pun intended, in more westerly time zones) on 5Star Max, with a couple more airings on Tuesday. So recently I sat down to watch it and do a review on it here.

John Travolta plays Tony Manero, a 19-year-old working-class Italian-American living in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. But he has dreams of enjoying life, as we see in the film's opening, when he's strutting his stuff walking down the street and looking for a new polyester shirt. The only problem is, he's technically at work, picking up a gallon of paint from the wholesaler to sell for a client of his boss Dan Fusco's paint shop. But Fusco generally likes Tony, as he's a good employee whom the regular customers seem to care for, too.

At home, Tony lives with his parents (Val Bisoglio and Julie Bavasso), grandmother, and kid sister. The only member of the family not living there is older brother Frank Jr. (Martin Shakar), who has moved out because he took Holy Orders and became a priest, which is a huge source of pride to Mom, who is clearly still fairly devout in her Catholic faith. Tony, on the other hand, lives more for his Saturday nights out at the disco, and that brings constant strife between him and Mom.

Part of the reason Tony lives for the disco is that he's a good dancer. Or, at least, everybody tells him he's a good dancer and a lot of the women want to dance with him. One of those women is Annette (Donna Pescow), but she seems to want to take the relationship beyond dancing while Tony is more concerned with winning the upcoming dance competition. So when Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney) shows up at the club, Tony is thrilled to have a new potential partner. But while Stephanie grew up in Bay Ridge, she's working at a Manhattan PR firm now where she meets famous people. She plans on crossing the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan and getting an apartment there, which is a world away from Bay Ridge and would present a serious culture clash for the two young lovers.

Things get more complicated when Frank Jr. shows up and announces that he's leaving the priesthood because he doesn't believe in it any more. He still likes his little brother, but you can only imagine how Mom feels about losing a priest. Another complication comes from Tony's circle of friends. They're sort of a high school clique that never grew up, getting into scrapes that they might think are harmless but are ultimately going to cause a lot more trouble. One of the group gets assaulted by another group, presumed to be Puerto Ricans, while another, Bobby C. (Barry Miller whom we recently saw in Fame) has knocked up his girlfriend. The resolutions of those two situations cause a lot of heartache. But there's still the big dance contest.

Everybody remembers Saturday Night Fever for the music, and rightly so. Disco was already becoming big when Saturday Night Fever was released in late 1977, but the songs written by the Bee Gees made disco the cultural icon of the second half of the decade, and the thing for which late-1970s pop culture is remembered even today. (Recall that Star Wars had been released at the start of the summer, and that one response was to produce a disco arrangement of the theme, that went to #1 on the charts.) I was too young to have experienced the lifestyle parts of disco in a meaningful way, more remembering just the music. For me, I remember other things like the plaid pants.

But there's also a story in Saturday Night Fever, and it's one that works pretty darn well, mostly because it's a universal story. A couple of years later, the Kinks had a comeback with a song called "Come Dancing", which touches on many of the same things, just in a different time and place (the singer's older sister goes dancing on Saturday nights with a series of suitors). Elsewhere in Britain, I think of movies like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. There's also pre-Code movies like Hot Saturday and the young folks in town going to a place on the lake to dance. If Andy Hardy could have shattered the Production Code, perhaps he would have had some of the sorts of adventures Tony has here.

Saturday Night Fever is a time capsule, to be sure, and a pretty darn interesting one, considering how much New York City has changed since the 1970s. But it's also got a surprisingly good story behind that.