Grease
Randal Kleiser (1978)
The teenagers[1] in the unending queue for the evening performance of Grease at the Odeon in The Headrow[2] gape expectantly at the audience leaving the teatime show as if they were returning from Lourdes. Not that the still uninitiated are hopeful agnostics: the frenetic publicity for Grease has been preaching to the converted for weeks, months now. It isn’t cold for November but this keen anticipatory edge to the atmosphere outside the cinema is rather chilling. How can a film so eagerly and so long awaited fail to be an anti-climax? Unless, of course, you’ve scorned the publicity and read the consistently bad reviews for the film and consider yourself wholly Grease-proof. In that case, you might enjoy the film, terrible as it is, as a pleasant surprise.
Cinema chains depressed by the decline of film audiences must have cheered up in recent months. In less than a year, four exceptionally big box-office hits have been released in Britain: the science-fiction pair, Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the very different musicals, Saturday Night Fever and, now, Grease. In the course of 1978, John Travolta has become a huge star at the age of twenty-four. Saturday Night Fever and Grease are very much his pictures: I shouldn’t think one per cent of these films’ adolescent admirers could tell you the director of either. (This is understandable with Grease, which hardly seems to have been directed at all. ‘Randal Kleiser’, the name on the credits, sounds like a joke anagram.) Travolta’s performance in Saturday Night Fever was deservedly applauded (he received an Academy Award nomination) but those interested in his progress as a major screen actor are bound to regret the colossal commercial success of Grease. This is a bad film that is making Travolta even more famous – and making it difficult for him ever to appear in a better-known picture. Will he want to be remembered as the star of Grease? Of course, the teenage crush on him and on this film will pass soon enough but will his prospects as a serious actor suffer as a result of his links with it? It’s possible, and might be probable if artistically ambitious directors have the same prejudices as many film critics. It’s as predictable that the latter will deride Grease as that the teen audience will praise it. Both sides may struggle to love or hate it as much as they’d like; yet both are equally programmed and equally susceptible – in diametrically-opposed directions – to the sledgehammer publicity.
Grease seems to have been with us for ages. ‘You’re the One That I Want’ and ‘Summer Nights’ have, between them, spent more than three months of this year at the top of the singles charts. Top of the Pops scooped, for both, clips from the film so that when we eventually see Grease on the cinema screen these songs already have a reminiscent edge. However rotten they may be (not that they are), they’re a part of pop music history – one or both of them will, for many people, always evoke the summer of 1978 like nothing else. When a property like Grease becomes a blockbuster, it’s strange to think back to when it was merely a very successful Broadway-West End stage musical. Strange too now to recall the things you knew about John Travolta – like his television role in Welcome Back, Kotter and his real-life relationship with the late Diana Hyland – long before what is now his fan club could even pronounce his surname. In Saturday Night Fever, Tony Manero’s pea-brained, social-climbing girlfriend and dancing partner Stephanie (played by Karen Lynn Gorney) thinks that Romeo and Juliet originated as the Franco Zeffirelli movie. It’s worth reminding yourself that Grease and its star do both have a past and aren’t simply the chimerical products of skilful advertising.
I don’t know much about the stage Grease except that the two poles and touchstones of the show were Elvis Presley and Sandra Dee, and their imagined battle for the souls of American teenagers in the late 1950s. The film Grease retains hardly any of this satirical aspect: it’s just a flaccid, garish version of pop-oriented, high-school romance movies of the last years of the fifties. (The title track which the Bee Gees have written, although it’s a smashing pop song, reinforces this shift.) Nevertheless, the heroine has the same name, Sandy, that she had on stage; and the bad girls’ number ‘Look At Me, I’m Sandra Dee’ still features. Although Sandra Dee is chiefly associated with the meticulously sanitised Tammy pictures, the prototype of these (which gets a sarcastic mention in the screen Grease) starred Debbie Reynolds. Sandra Dee had been in films since the mid-fifties but her debut in the series was in Tammy and the Doctor in 1962[3]. If the beginning of the rock ‘n’ roll era is, for the sake of convenience, dated to the release of ‘Rock Around the Clock’ in 1955, the year in which Elvis Presley completed his early recordings on the Sun label, the Dee-Presley counterpoints don’t therefore make full chronological sense. The second verse of ‘Look At Me, I’m Sandra Dee’ begins:
‘Look at me, I’m Doris Day,
I just wasn’t brought up that way!’
This couplet is weaker than the opening verse’s:
‘Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee,
Lousy with virginity.’
Even so, the basic scheme of Grease might make more sense, certainly to a British audience, if Doris Day, rather than Sandra Dee, were the morally wholesome rival to the iconoclast Elvis. Day’s best-known fifties comedies (Pillow Talk, Teacher’s Pet, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies[4]), which usually depend on the pathetic and eventually prurient running joke that the heroine’s romantic relationship isn’t consummated, are still shown with depressing regularity on British (and, I’d guess, American) television. The rationale and advantage of using Sandra Dee is that she’s contemporary with the girls in Grease. (Doris Day typically played a shrewdly wacky career woman, living in a foully well-appointed apartment.) The irony is that nearly all the school kids in the film look to be in their late twenties. The school, Rydell High, is a familiar Hollywood educational establishment in more ways than this. The staff comprises a smattering of harmless eccentrics. Apart from sport and mending cars, there are no lessons. (It’s rather similar in the snack bar that the kids favour: no one ever pays for anything.) Grease is shot in Panavision and the broadness of most of the acting matches the width of the screen. The opening titles appear over animated cartoons that introduce the main characters’ faces and personalities, and a comic-strip element is in evidence throughout most of the hundred and ten minutes to follow. It’s difficult to tell, though, how much a performance is intentionally crude caricature or how much it’s a desperate, over-pitched attempt to look and sound dumbly adolescent.
The cringe-making list of adult actresses playing girls who skip and squeal to convey their innocent youth (Morag Hood’s Natasha in the BBC’s War and Peace is a flagrant example) grows every year. So it’s rather a pleasure, especially after her mauling by the critics, to report how convincing Olivia Newton-John looks as Sandy. Olivia (as I’ll call her from this point on – for the sake of brevity) is, believe it or not, thirty. Yet the wide eyes, pixie nose, indecently white teeth and apple cheeks, combined with a prim-but-bouncy hairstyle, enable her to pass for eighteen (or less: physically, she’d make an ideal Peter Pan). Even allowing that it’s difficult to raise a laugh with chestnuts as old as, say, choking on your first cigarette, Olivia is inept at comedy. Although she’s probably unintentionally wooden when she speaks lines like, ‘Oh, Danny, this means so much to me’, the woodenness works for her because it reinforces the truly ingenuous quality that marks Sandy out (and distinguishes Olivia from the rest of the cast: the film-makers have also made it easier for her by turning her character into an Australian). Facially, she is more expressive and the camera likes her. Yet her singing – the one thing she’s good at – is problematic.
Some reviews have complained that Olivia misses out on both Sandy’s sexiness – in the ‘You’re the One That I Want’ routine, when she has ‘compromised her principles’ – and her earlier purity. Sandy is still an amateur siren, however, when she changes her spots at the end of the film so Olivia’s awkwardness in this new incarnation is just about plausible. At first I regretted how little singing she had to do (just one-and-a-bit solos and the two chart-toppers with Travolta) because she’s obviously proficient in this department, and that explains how she got the part. But it’s when she sings that Olivia is least in character. In her main solo, ‘Hopelessly Devoted to You’, she does more than express Sandy’s feelings in a way that her minimal acting resources prevent her from doing. Her voice is that of an emotionally experienced woman, and Sandy isn’t that. The pity of Olivia’s performance is that her shortcomings make her appealing while her strengths distort the character she’s playing. Nevertheless, you don’t feel embarrassed for her the way you did for other pop stars making their screen acting debut (Lulu, Helen Reddy, Adam Faith – although he, of course, improved).
And then there’s Travolta. He is an exceptionally expressive screen presence and the audience feels empathy with him from the start. That’s in spite of the fact that, in Grease, he’s a bit of a drag to begin with: the role of Danny requires him to be a cut above the other members of the leather-jacketed ‘T-Birds’ gang whose ringleader he is. He’s also a little subdued and embarrassed because Danny has already fallen in love with Sandy (expecting her to go back to Australia: there was a last-minute change of plan!) and wants to keep his credibility both with her and with his mates. Travolta is able both to parody and to reactivate his character through his physical energy, his big, slobby mouth, his dirty schoolboy smile, those disarmingly bright and glinting blue chips of eyes. You don’t feel completely happy with his performance in Grease in the way you did with his work in Saturday Night Fever because you’re never quite sure what he’s aiming at and his walk – an extraordinary combination of sinuous and lumbering – sticks out as a crude satirical effect. He projects so much that he keeps throwing the film out of kilter and into the perverse parody genre of Brian De Palma’s cinema (Travolta made his big-screen debut as the baddie in Carrie). Travolta has a livelier pelvis than Elvis and the adolescent avidity in his face as he yelps, ‘You’re the one that I want’, is verging on bestial. His singing is indifferent (and he’s saddled with a terrible solo in ‘Sandy’) although more urgently winsome than, say, David Soul’s.
You still get glimpses of Travolta’s acting potential here. When Danny meets Sandy again and masks his initial genuine enthusiasm with a burst of condescending smart-talk to reassure the T-Birds, the raunchy, shrewd Rizzo (Stockard Channing) sees through him and throws him a scornful glance. Travolta shows by the subtlest facial movement that Danny understands, is hurt and is ashamed. On the whole, though, his great virtue in Grease is that he looks, without trying, like a cartoon of a teen screen idol – he doesn’t, therefore, need to act up a caricature like the other performers. The slapstick scenes on the sports field, as Danny works to get into trim to impress Sandy that he’s healthy and respectable, show Travolta to be a gifted clown too. The rest of the cast, in their garish outfits and make-up, shriek and make faces. Jeff Conaway, as the number two man, Kenickie, is a hyperactive embarrassment. Stockard Channing is, in more ways than one, too senior to play Rizzo (who turns out to be a tart with a heart) but her comic timing is assured and her singing strong. Rizzo is the only character in the film to indicate something like gumption, even intelligence.
If you’ve seen the clips from Grease on Top of the Pops you may have been struck by the contrast between the spacious, unnaturally brightly-coloured outside locations and the mugging chorus line, in their comic-strip hairdos and make-up, which seems to belong on a small stage within a stylised design. This isn’t a contrast consistent throughout the film (it’s too careless to have a style of any kind) but the arrangement of the singers and dancers sometimes looks like an attempt to replicate on the big screen the stage show’s pastiche aspects. The elaborate and adroit cinematography in Cabaret, coupled with Bob Fosse’s angular, constricted choreography, enabled that film to avoid feeling like a big American musical and aided the expressionist designs for the Kit Kat Klub scenes. The fantasy sequences in Grease, like ‘Beauty School Dropout’, aren’t inspired but the concentration of the performers into the centre of the frame, leaving a large white periphery, suggests what might have been possible if the film hadn’t been conceived as a teenage blockbuster.
[November 1978]
[1] Afternote: I’ll apologise at the outset for the pompous tone. The condescending references to teenagers are especially alarming, give that I was only twenty-two when I wrote this …
[2] Afternote: In Leeds.
[3] Afternote: This is wrong. Dee appeared in the second film in the series, Tammy Tell Me True, in 1961.
[4] Afternote: Also (just) wrong. Please Don’t Eat the Daisies appeared in 1960.