"Saturday Night Fever" (1977)

Watching Saturday Night Fever I was reminded of how much Italian American youth culture has changed (some would say declined) and yet how much of it remains the same. Specifically I was regarding it in terms of something that likely, and thankfully, doesn’t spring immediately to mind: The Jersey Shore.

On the face Saturday Night Fever is more evenhanded and the cultural niche it represents isn’t nearly as much a sad caricature. The film also gives a greater sense of classiness. There isn’t grinding here; this is disco and it is a dance form and mating ritual that requires skill and knowledge. The courtship patterns revolve around your ability to prove your dancing capability. 

But this is still of the same working class milieu as that oft denigrated series, and there’s an almost anthropological quality to the film. The film is a wonderful slice of Italian American culture: The heavy Catholic conservatism, the devotion to traditional gender roles, the working class sense of pride and machismo. 

Casual racism and sexism are tacitly accepted. Latin Americans are frequently disparaged and racial slurs are muttered under the breath constantly (The great irony of Italians being assimilated into American culture is their adoption of the behavior once aimed towards them). Tony and his friends are good old boys out skirt chasing. “What did you say your name was?” one guy asks after a hook-up, and it establishes this group’s feelings towards the opposite sex. Tony and his friends are dismissive of women if they’re not fulfilling their desires or acting as trophies.  

Tony (John Travolta) is the protagonist here and what sets him apart is a constant awareness of how lousy this life he is living is. He is not content like his friends; he recognizes how confining being stuck in Brooklyn is, and he desperately wishes to escape to Manhattan. He has a job at a paint store where he has security and he is well-liked even when he is a bit flakey. Tony’s only escape from reality is dancing and it matters more to him than anything else. “You make it with one of these chicks and they think you’ve got to dance with them,” he says.  

Tony’s awareness of how trapped he is doesn’t make his behavior forgivable but a through-line of the plot, and what enriches it, is how Tony comes to realize how wrong-headed his beliefs are, especially towards women. Tony and his boys see women as objects, but when Tony falls for Stephanie (Karen Gorney), a woman who isn’t immediately head-over-heels for him, he has to change his tact, and when his smooth operating fails in a pathetic act of desperation he half-heartedly tries to rape her (a plot-line that the film sadly doesn't resolve as fully as it probably should and that dovetails with another later, highly uncomfortable sex scene that borders on rape).

Most people forget these darker elements lurking in the film. What sticks in the mind are the dance numbers set to the best of the Bee Gees. The dances are electrifying and director John Badham shoots them so that we feel the raw passion and satisfaction of the performers; this is the only time they feel truly alive. The camerawork often has the swagger of Tony, subjectively taking on his perspective and turning his love for this lifestyle into our love for it. But when his regrets arrive, they become our regrets as well (and we start to realize them far in advance of him).

Saturday Night Fever’s pleasure derives, in part, from luxuriating in the environment of Italian American culture but what remains remarkable is its willingness to show all the nitty-gritty, awful and (as an Italian American myself I can admit) largely true details.   

Grade: B+