Saturday Night Fever (1977)
I have been dancing since I was 3 years old in baby ballet classes. Currently, I dance 10 hours a week, 4 times a week. It’s safe to say that it’s something I’m very passionate about, and surprise surprise, I love movies about dance, from documentaries to fictional tales. Saturday Night Fever might be my favorite movie about dance and about 70’s culture. Underneath the colorful lighting, extravagant dancing, and disco music, Saturday Night Fever is a drama about New York City class systems. With strong themes of code switching, sexual assault, and finding one’s passion, this character study about young people from Bayridge, Brooklyn is magical and heartbreaking.
When trying to come up with adjectives to describe this movie, magic is the one word that really sticks with me. The main characters live on the edge of society, in an Italian American working class area of Brooklyn. Leading man Tony Manero (John Travolta), feels stuck in an endless cycle of working at a paint shop then going home to his very traditional family, the only exciting thing in his life is going to the disco with his friends. His spirit truly comes alive on the weekends when he goes to the 2001 Odyssey Club, where he transforms into another person. During the day he works at a dead-end job, but at the club he’s an astonishing dancer where people go out of their way to watch and try to dance with him. The way that director John Badham is able to show the dramatic differences between characters in their day to day vs. at the club makes this movie so magical. He creates a world of wonder inside of one where there is seemingly none.
If it weren’t for the dance sequences in this movie, Saturday Night Fever would be a gut wrenching film to watch. Racial violence, sexual assault, and young rebellion are all exhibited in the 1 hour 58 minutes flick. There is some serious magic in the dancing and the groovy disco soundtrack. As a dancer, the dancer performances given by John Travolta and Karen Lynn Gorney are very impressive, and they go exquisitely with the original soundtrack. Fun facts: the music from the film alone sold 54 million copies, is one of the best selling albums of all time, and is the second best selling movie soundtrack in history to date, first being “The Bodyguard”.
This movie is one of the most criminally underrated films from the ‘70s. Even with the funky Bee Gees music, bright clothing, and incredible disco dancing, this film about young people from the seedy side of Brooklyn still holds up in modern America. Saturday Night Fever is an iconic tribute to disco, New York City, and an era of intense social change.
