Posted on 05/12/2017 8:49:22 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
In the closing minutes of Saturday Night Fever, the following events occur: A racist injustice, an attempted date rape, a gang rape, a horrific accidental death with an element of suicide, and (not least) a nighttime ride on the disco-era New York City subway. The film concludes with the hero getting rejected by his lady. Naturally it was one of the biggest hits of 1977.
Baby Boomers jammed theaters to see Saturday Night Fever (which earned the equivalent of over $350 million in today’s dollars) and Gen-Xers (like me) either sneaked in to see its forbidden R-rated depravities or watched it later on HBO, where it popped up frequently in the early 1980s. Today, with the film available on the Hulu streaming service and Paramount having just issued a 40th anniversary Blu-Ray director’s cut, it stands as an unusually vivid portrait of an era, one of the most singular and gripping dramas of the late Seventies.
At the time, kids yearned to be adults, and movies reflected that. Today, adults yearn to be kids, and movies reflect that too. In 2016, each of the top 13 films at the box office was either a superhero fantasy or a cartoon, seven of them released by Disney. Saturday Night Fever reminds us that even blockbuster movies used to carry young people the news that life was fraught with error, anguish, and disappointment. Today if a major studio decided to bank on a film like it, the climactic dance contest would have to be a path to, at least, a transcendent moment of fame on a TV show, and romantic fulfillment would be a given.
SNF, though, is a rags-to-rags story: John Travolta’s Tony Manero is no better off at the end than he was at the beginning. When he and his partner Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney) win a disco contest, he knows the victory is undeserved and attributable to the judging panel being composed of his peers from an Italian-American Brooklyn neighborhood. Tony thinks a Puerto Rican couple should have won, and he’s absolutely correct: They’re dazzling. So he gives them the trophy and tries to rape Stephanie in a car. Later, a despairing buddy, who believes his life is ruined because he got his girlfriend pregnant, clowns around on the Verrazano Bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island until he falls to his death. “There’s ways of killing yourself without killing yourself,” Tony tells the police. Later the same night, with the sun about to come up, Tony takes the subway to Stephanie’s apartment, where she forgives him for attacking her but reiterates that she isn’t interested in him romantically. The end.
Those who haven’t seen the film sometimes assume it’s campy and silly, a pageant of bad taste. But if the bouncy Bee Gees songs typified a musical era, the crushing story typified a cinematic one. Films were generally muted, earthy, gritty, and downbeat in the 1970s, when even blockbusters frequently concluded with the defeat, compromise, or death of the hero, and any triumphs achieved were seldom unalloyed. Today such stories tend to be fenced off in independently financed films, usually with small budgets, that emerge during Oscar season and attract small audiences.
It’s a commonplace to say that Seventies filmmakers were simply drinking the cultural water, which was infected with a sour tang left by Vietnam and Watergate. That isn’t what happened, though. Movies were reflecting the natural disposition of artists — gloomy and cynical — because 1970s Hollywood was being led by artists for the first time. Starting around 1967, 1930s-era Hollywood moguls, such as Jack Warner at Warner Bros and Daryl F. Zanuck at Fox, discovered to their chagrin that their long-cherished idea of what constituted dazzling, can’t-miss entertainment (Camelot; Hello, Dolly!) was poised to bankrupt them. Cheap movies made for hippies, like Easy Rider and M*A*S*H, were the new blockbusters. The Hollywood suits were scared that they no longer understood the audience, so for the first time ever they let the artists off-leash. The creative types went too far, though, and as the 1980s began, artist-driven disasters such as Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate and Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart made the executives realize that auteurist films could lose money as surely as glitzy family spectacles. The executives reasserted control and restored the happy-endings policy.
Instructing young adults that they couldn’t always get what they wanted wasn’t the main purpose of 1970s filmmaking, but it was a side benefit.
Instructing young adults that they couldn’t always get what they wanted wasn’t the main purpose of 1970s filmmaking, but it was a side benefit. The movies amounted to a generational warning about the perils and setbacks of adult life. We learned that the system was hopelessly stacked against us, that dreams rarely come true, that people are flawed and life will wear you down. Movies today, though, are calibrated to reach an audience raised with the certain knowledge that self-esteem is the most important trait, that young people will lead the way, and that you can have anything you can imagine, as soon as you can imagine it. Kids identify with childish superheroes who rule their environments. Deadpool, Iron Man, and Harley Quinn kick butt and crack jokes. Harry Potter can come up with a spell for any occasion. Katniss Everdeen is fierce and unbeatable.
Even when today’s movie heroes are in extreme danger, such as Matt Damon’s stranded-on-Mars Mark Watney in The Martian, they’re so cool and confident that quips never stop flowing out of their mouths. Successful movies reflect their audiences, but they help shape them as well. Kids imagine themselves getting lost in space a million miles from home and they think: That’s me in any situation — I got this. We’ve raised a generation of little superheroes. Small wonder that the intern in your office seems surprised that she’s assigned boring tasks, or expects a promotion after three months, or offers you advice on how best to reorganize the company.
In the late ‘70s, I was all Country & Western and Rock & Roll ... the existence of Disco barely entered my consciousness.
One of the interesting things about SNF is that the movie is very much NOT the movie that was advertised. It was advertised as this disco fun time fluff piece, but it’s actually a pretty deep and dark movie. Usually advertising a completely different movie fails, but somehow it succeeded.
***In 2016, each of the top 13 films at the box office was either a superhero fantasy or a cartoon,***
I’ve been saying this for years that today’s young people live in a world of fantasy.
Our six-plex movie theater often has six fantasy superhero si-fi shows on at the same time.
The only time I have been there is when the remake of True Grit came out.
In the olden days a superhero movie would be filmed cheaply in black and white, cheap special effects and be shown on the bottom half of a drive in double feature with Hercules and the Mars Maidens.
Now they are made with 150 million dollar budgets.
I wanna strut..............
You say that like it was something bad.
Regards,
**You say that like it was something bad.**
As long as it is not my money... they can turnout all the duds they want.
What NR misses, but was an important point is that stayin’ alive suffices. The author almost seems to wish for defeatism, which is merely a failure in his writing, I’m sure. There’s a reason this was PARTY music; it made people feel good to know everyone has it tough, but we’re all surviving:
Well, 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
And now it’s all right, it’s okay
And you may look the other way
We can try to understand The New York Times’ effect on man
Whether you’re a brother or whether you’re a mother you’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Feel the city breakin’ and everybody shakin’ and we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Also important about SNF:
That Tony is almost a rapist is key. He SHOULDN’T win at life; he’s not virtuous. We’re not supposed to be horrified at his violence because she’s not; she’s still friends with him. But we’re relieved that he doesn’t have a happy ending.
My wife and I enjoy movie diner-dates, but is increasingly difficult to find suitable movies.
We want adult films, and most of today’s offerings are juvenile.
I often joke they are for children, often even in their 30s and 40s.
IOW a cross-section of today’s society.
Right you are. They weren’t obnoxious in your face pains in the ass then.There wasn’t even a hint of queer marriage...it would have cost them severe dental problems.
Gay?
Nahhhhh.
And plenty of f-bombs, before that was a thing. The one he said when they were sitting on a bench looking at the Brooklyn Bridge near the end of the movie still cracks me up.
I agree. I was only about six years old when the movie came out & I didn’t watch it until I was in my twenties.
I was expecting a fun movie. Instead, as you stated, it was pretty dark & depressing at times.
My older Sister had the Soundtrack LP & I loved listening to it. I may receive flack for this but I enjoy Disco, when I’m in the mood.
I guess I like Disco because it was one of the first genres of music I was exposed to & it reminds me of my childhood.
I think many of us would like to be the guy who can look in the face of (reasonably) certain death, recognize it as such, and come off with a jocular remark rather than crying and wetting his pants.
Of course, it does help to have the screenwriters on your side...and if the shooting schedule means you performed the ending in a studio before going out on location to perform the "gonna die now" stuff, that's just gravy!
Disco gets a bad rap because of the clothes and society that went with it. When push comes to shove disco is just funk with an emphasis on dancability. And funk is awesome.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.