"Saturday Night Fever,' revisited

Saturday Night Fever, the 1977 disco film that made a star of John Travolta, suffers from numerous flaws: The plotting is obvious and the characters are caricatures. Even the dancing— the film's alleged raison d'être—isn't very good.

Nevertheless, Saturday Night Fever retains its interest after more than 30 years for its power as a coming of age story and for its evocation of a specific time: that brief moment of sexual freedom, post-Pill and pre-AIDS. Its characters' efforts to find themselves ring true to those of us born to that particular slice of the Baby Boom.

Ostensibly, Saturday Night Fever was based not on fiction but on journalism— specifically, a 1976 New York Magazine article, "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night," describing the nightlife of working-class kids in Brooklyn. Though most hip observers thought disco's moment had already passed by then, the Australian producer Robert Stigwood bought the rights to the article and proceeded to make a film whose subject embraced much more than disco. Not until 1996 was it revealed that the original article's author, Nik Cohn, had fabricated the whole story. Here was one film, ironically, that may have been more true to real life than its original journalistic source.

The story concerns Tony Manero (John Travolta), a good Catholic boy who lives with his parents in Brooklyn and works in a hardware store. Where he really lives, though, is at the disco, where Tony and his pals drink, get high, pick up girls, and dance— ah, dance. One of his regular partners is Annette (Donna Pescow), with whom Tony executes precise but joyless maneuvers.

One night, though, Tony sees a girl who is literally dancing circles around her partner. Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney) is another Brooklyn kid, but one who's attempting to escape her blue-collar roots by way of an office job in Manhattan. Tony convinces the skeptical Stephanie to be his partner in an upcoming dance contest.

Madonna vs. whore

Tony, a product of his culture and his time, lacks a mental model for females beyond the extremes of Madonna or whore. Annette, who pines for Tony, struggles to embody either of those archetypes in order to win him, but she is elbowed aside by Tony's fascination with the slightly older, apparently sophisticated Stephanie.

The film's secondary characters also struggle to resolve the conflicts between the strictures of family, church and neighborhood on the one hand and their own desires and needs on the other. Tony's brother, Father Frank, decides to quit the priesthood. Bobby C., one of Tony's sidekicks, seeks advice from one person after another as to what to do about his pregnant girlfriend. (None of them can suggest anything but marriage.)

The various elements all climax in a single evening, during which (a) Tony and his friends attack a Puerto Rican gang in retaliation for an earlier attack on one of their own, (b) Tony and Stephanie score an undeserved win over a Puerto Rican couple at the dance contest, (c) Tony unsuccessfully tries to rape Stephanie, (d) Tony's friends successfully gang-rape Annette, with Tony present but not participating, and (e) Bobby C., whose romantic travails had been played as a running joke until this moment, falls/throws himself off the bridge that had been used as symbolic leitmotif.

From Serpico to Rocky

The movie was first released with an R rating, reflecting its numerous dark plot elements and raunchy language (including, according to director John Badham, the first direct mention of a blow job in a feature film). To attract a larger audience, it was re-edited and re-released in 1978 with a PG rating—the version most of us saw at the time. (The current DVD has the R version.)

The mid-'70s was the period during which Martin Scorsese was getting his feet under him (Mean Streets in 1973; Taxi Driver in 1976). Scorsese was just one of several filmmakers making urban dramas with Italian-American protagonists: there was also Sidney Lumet's Serpico in 1973 and Dog Day Afternoon in 1975, as well as John Avildsen's Rocky, set on the equally mean streets of Philadelphia in 1976.

The gritty feeling of these dramas imbued Badham's approach to Saturday Night Fever. The racism and sexism of its characters is utterly unselfconscious, and the casual approach to drug use and sexual encounters evokes that period when hippie hedonism hadn't yet morphed into yuppie striving.

Claustrophobia

The movie's visual style was also true to the urban dramas of the time. It was filmed on the streets, late at night and very early in the morning to avoid throngs of Travolta fans. (At this point he was still mostly the teen heartthrob from the TV sitcom, "Welcome Back, Kotter.") The Steadicam was new technology then. Its use enabled filming in real-life settings. The hardware store where Tony works and the stairway down to the dance studio where he practices with Stephanie are presented with a claustrophobic immediacy.

The urban dramas are only half of the film-history context of Saturday Night Fever. Its other innovation concerned its use of music.

Plenty of musicals had been set in New York before: On the Town (1949) and its bleak successor, It's Always Fair Weather (1955), plus, of course, the magnificent West Side Story (1961). These are the musicals that people who hate musicals hate. In all of them, the singing and dancing occur as breaks from the overall narrative.

Between drama and musical

But there's a whole separate tradition of movie musicals in which the performances are integrated into the narrative, as something that the characters actually do. However, musicals of this sort traditionally involved characters who are performers, from Busby Berkeley's show biz musicals (such as 42nd Street and Footlight Parade, both 1933) to Bob Fosse's classics, Cabaret (1972) and All That Jazz (1979)— the latter, of course, also set in New York.

Saturday Night Fever takes off from this latter tradition of integrated musicals. All the dancing is done by characters who dance. Most of the music is framed as recordings in the dance venues (disco, studio) where the non-singing characters do their dancing. Not all of it, though: The exception— the Bee Gees songs written for the movie— is precisely where the film straddles the line between urban drama and musical.

Words vs. music

The movie opens with Tony strutting down the street in time to the BeeGees' anthemic Stayin' Alive: "You can tell by the way I use my walk/ I'm a woman's man; no time to talk./ Music loud and women warm,/ I've been kicked around since I was born." The song perfectly encapsulates both Tony's character and, with its quintessential "four on the floor" disco beat, the milieu in which Tony comes (and stays) alive. A few minutes later, we hear Night Fever in counterpoint to Tony's Saturday night primping.

Both of these songs are played over scenes in which Tony is alone: they are part of the music that shapes Tony's not particularly complex interior life. The music thus serves to comment on Tony's character, and functions somewhat more ironically than one might expect from the songs themselves.

Other Bee Gees songs are played in the disco. Tony does his floor-clearing solo to You Should Be Dancing, which includes a telling bit of byplay. The scene opens with Tony dancing with some random girl; when the song starts, he mutters something and walks away from her. Everyone quickly leaves the floor, except for this girl, who stands at the edge but remains on the dance floor, watching expressionlessly as Tony struts and preens. Alone among the crowd, she's not nodding or clapping or grooving along; she simply stands and watches, giving lie to the lyrics ("My woman gives me power,/ Goes right down to my blood").

Prelude to rape

In the dance contest, Tony and Stephanie dance to a fourth Bee Gees song, More Than a Woman, ending with a long romantic twirl during which they lose themselves in the moment and forget the careful choreography they'd prepared. Tony then struts off the floor, Stephanie trailing behind him, as the song fades out. Again, Badham uses the song with a certain amount of irony: A few minutes later Tony is trying to rape Stephanie, proving that she isn't, actually, more than a woman to him.

The final Bee Gees track is, again, used to show us Tony's inner thoughts, now more tumultuous. He spends the night after the contest riding back and forth alone on the subway, trying to sort out everything that's happened. The song is the gentle disco ballad (sic), How Deep Is Your Love. In the morning he finds his way to Stephanie's new Manhattan apartment, begs for (and receives) her forgiveness, and the movie ends with them pledging friendship, if not love.

In the late '70s you couldn't escape the music from Saturday Night Fever. The soundtrack album sold 40 million copies, and its songs (only a third of them by the Bee Gees) were everywhere: on the radio, at parties, in bars and, of course, in discos. The album thus took on a life and a cultural resonance that ignored the film's subtler usage of the music. As a repeat viewing of the film today will attest, that was itself a far darker experience than the buoyant dance beat might suggest.