Saturday Night Fever
The biggest mistake people make about this movie is saying that it's about disco. Yes, it's soundtrack is disco, it popularized disco, and the main character is a local disco dancer. However, the movie is actually about realizing that there's more out there to strive for... That popularity isn't everything and that being a local hero doesn't amount to much, amongst other things. The movie is truly one of the best urban movies of the 1970s, and that's saying a lot as those, especially ones that take place in New York as this one does, were very popular in that time period due to the proliferation of such directors as Scorscese, De Palma, and Lumet.
The movie stars John Travolta as a Brooklynite who is very popular in the area for his dancing in the local nightclub. He's known as the best dancer there, and is very popular with the ladies. He can get whoever he wants. He becomes attracted to this new girl he sees, Stephanie, and wants to get to know her and, lets face it, he wants to lay her. He decides that they should enter the local dance competition at the 2001 Odyssey disco club, but she plays hard to get. She finally relents, and he replaces his current dance partner, who worships him, with Stephanie. Now, Stephanie is more sophisticated than him and works to get out of Brooklyn and move to Manhattan, chiding Travolta's character Tony, when he thinks he has it all there in Brooklyn living with his parents and dancing on Friday nights and hanging out with his friends. From there on, I'd be giving away too much of the last third of the movie, which I don't want to do.
I know, it doesn't sound like much, but the movie does it's thing very well. Even if you don't like disco music, the soundtrack is essential here. It's the movie's life-breath, and it wouldn't be a great film without it. Now, the disco scene presented in this movie was made up. The author of the New York Magazine article the film was based on has admitted that he fabricated the whole thing. The disco scene of the time was mostly found in gay bars. The author based his article on the old Mod craze, and just brought in the styles of the time. However, the movie did create it's own scene, which is pretty spectacular in and of itself. It also launched Travolta to super-stardom. He was nominated for an Academy Award for this role, and deservedly so. Hell, Brooklyn should have been nominated, as it's a character all to itself! One of my favorite scenes in the movie, which I can't link to as no-one's uploaded it to youtube, involves Tony and his gang fooling around on the suspension cables of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which at the time was the longest suspension bridge in the world... All while a disco version of Night on Bald Mountain is playing on the soundtrack. Wonderful scene.
Now why would this film be important for me? Well, I have to admit, I like to listen to disco sometimes. I especially did when I was 12, which was when I first saw the movie. I had wanted to see it really badly, but it was R rated (for good reason), so I couldn't.... Until I noticed that there was a PG version, which is essentially the way it was shown on network television in the 1980s. So we go to Suncoast, which was the big video store at the time. Now, this was before internet cataloging, so you had to look through this big book at the store, about as big as a phone book, and ask them to order it for you. So I got to see it that way. The PG version of the movie simply removes the bad language and replaces it with other words. ("Hey, you fuck!" becomes "Hey, you skunk!" and so on and so forth.) I was unprepared for how good the movie was, as I thought, like most do, that it was simply a disco movie. The movie has a pretty bad rape scene in it (done by our hero no less!), and yet has some of the loveliest moments filmed. It was probably what I would call my first "big boy" movie. It helped push my love of film even farther, and without seeing it, I probably would not have sought out drama like I do now in films. Back then I basically watched comedies and blockbusters like most people. Nothing's been the same since.
I finally saw the R rated version a few years ago, and now consider it the better cut. I suggest if you see the film, which I recommend you do, to see this version. Now, here's a little clip from the movie, just to show it's not all about disco.
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