Grease (1978)

Until now Grease is a movie that I had overlooked completely. It’s not that I’ve tried to avoid it, it’s just one of those movies I never got around to seeing. I approached it with certain expectations, and those expectations turned out to be spectacularly off-base.

I had expected a nostalgia-laden affectionate homage to 1950s America. In fact Grease has absolutely zero to do with the 1950s. There is not the slightest attempt to capture any of the spirit of 1950s music, movies, fashion or any aspect of 1950s pop culture. Grease is pure 1970s, all the way though.

But it is set in the 1950s. The fact that it bears no resemblance to the real 1950s, and bears no resemblance whatsoever to the 1950s of 1950s pop culture, makes it rather interesting. It also bears very little resemblance to the actual 1970s. Grease takes place in an alternative universe which has been constructed by throwing together random bits of pop culture from the previous 50 years. It’s a weird mishmash. It’s like a drug-induced fever dream.

One of the amusing perennial features of teen movies is that they usually do not include a single actual teenager. Grease takes this to extremes. We have 30-year-old Olivia Newton-John playing an innocent teenage girl, and we have 34-year-old (!) Stockard Channing as a teenage. This should have been enough to sink the movie but it just adds to the weird slightly surreal fantasy vibe.

We can dispose of the plot pretty quickly. An Australian girl named Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) has a chaste holiday romance with a nice boy named Danny (John Travolta). It comes to an end, as all holiday romances, come to an end. Sandy is going home to Australia.

But the story doesn’t end there. When Danny goes back to school at Rydell High School he is more than a little surprised to meet the new girl at school - yes, it’s Sandy. She didn’t go back to Australia after all. The attraction between them is still there but Sandy is shocked to discover that Danny is actually a bad boy. And she’s a good girl. Can a good girl find happiness with a bad boy?

There are various other sub-plots going on, involving the T-Birds (Danny’s gang) and the Pink Ladies (not exactly a female gang but they hang around with the T-Birds).

Despite not looking remotely like teenagers all the cast members are good, with Stockard Channing being outstanding and giving the only really nuanced performance in the movie.

In the final analysis however Grease was always going to stand or fall on the performances of the two leads. They come through with flying colours. Travolta has real charm. Olivia Newton-John is adorable. And when she cuts loose at the end, surprisingly sexy.

I’m not totally convinced about the job done by director Randal Kleiser. The movie is certainly colourful but the staging of the musical numbers is a bit uninspired. It was a long wait to hear the movie’s big hit, You’re the One That I Want, and it deserved a more stylish treatment. On the whole the actual songs however are pretty good. The songs are very much 70s songs.

Another delightfully weird thing in this movie is Sandy’s outfit at the end. She decides to transform herself into the kind of girl she thinks Danny wants. You might expect her to come out looking like a 1950s female juvenile delinquent, or a 1950s movie starlet. But in fact she looks like she’s auditioning for an S&M bondage video. It’s like a disco version of fetish gear. It is kind of sexy, but it’s unexpected to say the least.

Grease is a remarkably vulgar movie in every sense of the word. It revels in its bad taste. That’s part of its weird charm. It’s not ugly vulgarity. It’s cheerful bright and breezy vulgarity.

This is a movie that really is all about sex. The kids in this movie certainly want to find love, but they consider sex to be an essential ingredient in love.

What I was expecting was a light fluffy feelgood musical romance. What I got was more of a bizarre psychotronic movie. It’s a movie that exists in its own universe which slightly resembles the 1950s, but only slightly. It’s not that it’s a fantasy movie as such. It’s just slightly detached from any actual reality.

It’s not what I expected, but it’s more interesting than I expected.

Grease is fun in its own distinctive way. I enjoyed it.

The 40th anniversary DVD includes lots of extras and the transfer is fine.