Tony Manero (John Travolta) works in a hardware store. On weekends he goes to the 2001 disco. He’s the king of the dance floor there. But 2001 isn’t a glamorous night spot where you’ll run into A-list celebrities. It’s a third-rate dive in Brooklyn. It’s cheap and it’s tacky.
And Tony doesn’t have dreams of using his dancing as a gateway to fame and fortune. He doesn’t have the imagination for that. He’s a loser.
He hangs out with his buddies. They’re all losers.
He lives with his folks. His dad is a chronically unemployed construction worker. His mom prays all the time. Her only consolation is that Tony’s brother Frank is a priest. He’s almost a god to her.
Tony is hoping to win the dance competition at 2001. This is not exactly a big deal. The prize is a lousy five hundred bucks but that’s the total extent of Tony’s dreams.
He has a dancing partner, Annette (Donna Pescow). She’s madly in love with him. Tony dumps her when he sees Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney) dancing at 2001. He persuades Stephanie to be his new dancing partner.
Tony thinks Stephanie has class. He thinks that because he’s never met a woman with actual class. Stephanie does at least have ambitions but she’s as working class as Tony. Her middle-class affectations are merely absurd and tragic.
Stephanie dreams of success in Manhattan, perhaps in public relations. She probably won’t make it. She didn’t go to the right school, she didn’t go to college, she doesn’t have the right accent. She’s Brooklyn. She will always be Brooklyn. Maybe she will make an OK life for herself but she’s never going to have a penthouse apartment in Manhattan. Maybe she needs to set her sights a bit lower.
Maybe Tony needs to set his sights a bit higher.
The most powerful moment in the movie and the moment when Travolta really nails it is when Tony comes face to face with reality. He works in a hardware store. He’s a moderately good dancer. His chances of making it as a big-time dancer are zero. He’s just not good enough.
Annette needs to figure herself out as well. Her one real ambition is to go to bed with Tony.
This is also a gang movie. Tony’s gang is a bunch of losers and low-rent thugs. They get into fight with other gangs, who are losers as well. The other gang members are possibly even dumber than Tony.
There’s not a single characters in the movie who isn’t contemptible.
The guys treat the women with disrespect but they disrespect everybody and most crucially they have no respect for themselves.
There’s a subplot concerning Tony’s brother who has left the priesthood. It’s entirely pointless, it goes nowhere, it slows the movie and really it should have ended up on the cutting room floor. Subplots that go nowhere simply irritate viewers. It may have been included purely as an anti-Catholic element. The hostility to Catholicism here is pretty virulent.
This film is typical of a certain strand in Hollywood filmmaking - movies in which middle-class intellectuals express their seething hatred for America and for ordinary working-class Americans. It’s no coincidence that screenwriter Norman Wexler was Harvard-educated. Wexler also wrote the screenplay for Serpico, my least favourite 1970s Hollywood film.
This is a movie all about social class and the way different social classes inhabit different universes. Manhattan and Brooklyn are two different universes. Travel between those universes is not possible.
This is not a musical. There is dancing. Tony’s obsession with dancing is a major plot point. But it’s not a musical in the usual sense. There are no real big musical production numbers. The dancing sequences are rather unglamorous. Again, this seems to be a deliberate choice. This a story about Tony trying to figure out why his life is going nowhere, why he feels dissatisfied and empty. And trying to figure out if there is something he can do about it. The dancing really is incidental. Tony could have been a tennis player or a guitarist. It wouldn’t have mattered. What matters is that dancing is an escape from reality for him, and perhaps a way out.
What’s fascinating is that this is a visually very unattractive movie and this is clearly deliberate. Everything is grimy and seedy. You can almost smell the garbage rotting in the streets. There’s not a trace of glamour. There’s nothing glamorous about 2001. It’s just a dive. They have dancing and they have strippers as well. You can almost smell the stale liquor, the tobacco smoke, the sweat and the desperation.
This movie is a product of the New American Cinema and it has the miserable feel and scuzzy look often associated with that movement.
Saturday Night Fever is a deeply unpleasant movie about deeply unpleasant people. That was obviously the intention. It’s a good movie but it ain’t a feelgood movie. Recommended, if you know what to expect.
The Blu-Ray release is fine. I suspect this is a movie that was always supposed to look dark and depressing. The audio commentary by director John Badham isn’t really worth bothering with.
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