Saturday Night Fever
John Badham (1977)
I first saw it in April 1978, on a Friday evening, in Leicester Square, en route to Victoria to get the boat train to France for the term abroad in Poitiers. (I more or less adopted staying alive as my motto, for the first couple of weeks there anyway.) There are scenes in Saturday Night Fever that are still among the most enjoyable that I know. The film’s opening – John Travolta’s Tony Manero, in his red shirt and ox-blood shoes, moving down the street to the beat of ‘Stayin’ Alive’ – is legendary now. It should be hard to see it as if for the first time yet it’s still, after repeated viewings, fresh and exciting. I can’t think of many films which fuse social observation and character development – in the case of the main character anyway – as engrossingly and entertainingly as this one. This is as true of Tony’s bedroom preparations for Saturday night at the 2001 Odyssey club – backcombing his pompadour, setting out his clothes, moving to music in anticipation of what’s to come – as it is of the disco-dancing scenes themselves. John Badham handles the disco sequences so well: you’re observing social ritual (Norman Wexler’s screenplay is adapted from an article, ‘Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night’ by the British writer Nik Cohn, which appeared in New York magazine in 1976[1]) but Badham, with his cinematographer Ralf D Bode, makes you intensely aware of, and emotionally responsive to, the lights and the warmth and the soundtrack of the place. The music in the 2001 – especially ‘Night Fever’ – seems less like music being played than like an emanation of the disco’s atmosphere.
The emotions on display at the Manero family table are believably brittle and the line between aggression and humour, intentional or inadvertent, is invisible. Tony joins his parents, his grandmother and his young sister at the table before setting out for the 2001. He’s covered – so that his clothes don’t get messed up – in one of those sheets you wear in the barber’s chair. (When he gets into a row with his angry, out-of-work father, who clips him round the ear, Tony yells, ‘He hit my hair!’) The development of the central relationship between Tony and his dancing partner and girlfriend Stephanie, on and off the dance floor, is all you could want but Saturday Night Fever is rather disfigured by sub-plots like the one involving Tony’s elder brother, Frank Jr, the pride of the Manero family until he leaves the priesthood. You can’t dismiss this strand entirely: it’s worth having for the dinner table row between Tony and his mother (‘Now you got three shit kids’, he tells her) and for the short sequence in which we see that his brother’s fall from grace has given Tony a new spring in his step. But Frank Jr’s monologue, when he tells Tony what their parents’ reaction to his career change will be, is a lousy, crude piece of writing; and when his elder brother – in his ‘casual’ V-neck sweater, collar and tie – goes along with Tony to the 2001, the sense of encumbrance seems to reflect the dead weight of this sub-plot getting in the way of the main story. The sequences in which Tony and his friends go on perilous, semi-drunken walks across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (which links Brooklyn to Staten Island) are scarily effective but it becomes predictable that Bobby C, the mild-mannered dimwit in the group, is going to come to an unhappy end and that the Bridge is where he’ll meet it. There are a few bits that feel like uninspired borrowings from West Side Story – a moment when Tony’s group eyeball another group of kids playing basketball and especially a brawl with Puerto Rican boys whom Tony’s lot wrongly think are responsible for putting one of their number in hospital.
The courtship of Tony and Stephanie is just a delight. The physical contrasts between them are intense: John Travolta’s Tony is tall and dark and primary-coloured, and somewhat gross; Karen Lynn Gorney’s Stephanie is petite and neat and often dressed in pinks and pale blues. The role of Stephanie is thin but Gorney, who dances in character, shows us how this girl is – to Tony, as he watches her moving at the 2001 Odyssey and practising at the barre in the dance studio – different from the other girls. She also lets us see, at the same time, the desperation of Stephanie’s striving to be a cut above. Most of the time, Gorney’s voice sounds tinny but it’s this quality which makes the moment when she breaks down, and her voice acquires a roughness, particularly effective. Because John Travolta’s dancing here is so thrilling and memorable and celebrated, you tend to forget how marvellous his acting is off the dance floor. There’s an exchange between Tony and Stephanie in a coffee shop that’s hurtfully funny: trying to put him down, she makes herself look silly, dropping the names of celebs she’s seen at the Manhattan publishing outfit where she works as a secretary. Travolta has an amazing emotional transparency and in this scene he combines a nakedly wounded quality with crack comic timing – it’s gripping watching the easily wounded Tony realising, and working on the fact, that Stephanie is vulnerable too. Travolta is an intensely likeable performer but he and John Badham don’t avoid showing Tony Manero’s arrogance and chauvinism and thoughtlessness – and, unlike the ‘serious’ subplots in the film, these less attractive qualities of Tony are genuinely jarring. Apart from Travolta and Gorney and Julie Bovasso as Tony’s mother, the performances are nothing special but they’re solid and often lively – especially Donna Pescow as Annette, the dance partner (and would-be girlfriend) that Tony chucks. His friends are played by Joseph Cali, Paul Pape and Barry Miller, his father by Val Bisoglio, his brother by Martin Shakar, his boss in the paint shop where Tony works by Sam Coppola.
What makes Saturday Night Fever truly wonderful is the dancing so the filmmakers’ ambivalence about it, as a part of Tony’s life, is surprising and, in the closing stages, feels almost like a breach of contract with the audience. Performing at the 2001 is how Tony can be special. His talent and his status at the disco give him a kind of kinship with the stars whose posters adorn his bedroom walls: Al Pacino (in Serpico rather than The Godfather films), Sylvester Stallone (in Rocky – with Talia Shire, whose husband David wrote the additional music for Saturday Night Fever), Bruce Lee, Farrah Fawcett-Majors. Dancing is an escape route from the routine and financial constraints of the rest of Tony’s working-class life in the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn. But in the second half of the picture it’s increasingly presented as something he has to grow out of, grow up from – that’s made clear to Tony when he and Stephanie win the dance competition at the 2001 under what he sees as false, racially prejudiced pretences: a Puerto Rican pair do a more showily accomplished routine but finish in the runners-up slot. This scene is done well enough. (It also taps into the broader, very familiar sense of frustrated anti-climax you experience when something you’ve wanted for a long time comes to pass but not in the way it should have.) But the implication that the time comes when the dancing has to stop – there’s not much suggestion that Tony and Stephanie will resume their dance partnership – is an emotional letdown. Even so, I’ve always loved the final scene of Saturday Night Fever: the emigration from Brooklyn to Manhattan and the reconciliation between Tony and Stephanie both seem tentative and fragile – the film seems to stop rather than end and it’s anyone’s guess what happened next. (I’ve never seen and I don’t want to see the 1983 sequel Staying Alive, directed by Sylvester Stallone.) The beautiful ‘How Deep Is Your Love?’, another highlight of the great Bee Gees soundtrack, plays over the closing credits.
14 February 2010
[1] According to Wikipedia: ‘In the late 1990s, Cohn acknowledged that the article had been fabricated. A newcomer to the United States and a stranger to the disco lifestyle, Cohn was unable to make any sense of the subculture he had been assigned to write about.’