THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
THE SCREEN Saturday Night Fever begins with Tony Manero, as played by John Travolta, walking down the street to the beat of "Staying Alive," as performed by the Bee Gees. It's a sunny afternoon...
...Tony's boss beams in the background...
...The one limitation Tony's act has is nowhere more succinctly stated than in, ironically, the question posed by some of the movie's own ads: "What happens when the record's over...
...The paint can swings to it...
...This domestic squabble runs around Tony's dining room table at the same lightning speed that the light patterns flash across the dance floor at his favorite discotheque...
...Other people who are walking along the street—especially a certain kind of over-ripe young girl—seem to march to the same drummer...
...That this final dance scene is pure cliche is demonstrated, if anyone doubted it, by the fact that The Turning Point dissolves one of its dance scenes into a love scene between Mikhail Baryshnikov and Leslie Browne in just the same way...
...Unfortunately, the film has only been running for twenty minutes at this point...
...Mr...
...Tony blow-dries and styles his hair in front of his bedroom mirror at about the same rhythmic pace he walks...
...Them downstairs at dinner Tony's father reaches out playfully to muss Tony's hair, and Tony fends off the blow with irritation...
...But as soon as Tony dances with someone else—as soon as the movie tries to be about human relationships instead of just Mr...
...If Tony's solo is the high point of the film, the low point is the number he does with his inamorata, Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney), in the dance contest that is the climax of the film's plot...
...His hips move to it...
...It's a sunny afternoon in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, Tony carries a can of paint in one hand, and the music, presumably, is in his head...
...As long as it's just about Tony, the film is light on its feet...
...Travolta's very winning personality—the filmmakers have gone outside the frolic of the disco world...
...Even the camera and the cutting are under its spell as the point of view shifts without skipping a beat from medium or long shots to a tight, backtracking close-up of Tony's feet...
...It moves from one person to the next with the same dazzling precision that a whole room full of people display later when they get up like a chorus line to follow Tony's lead at the disco...
...Therefore, although it really has nothing else to offer, it must go doggedly on...
...But in this attempt to change over dancing from the subject of the film to a metaphor, the film ceases to have any subject at all...
...Hustle, hustle...
...Even after work at home, the beat goes on...
...For two different movies to have done the same scene in the same season like this is an aesthetic gaffe roughly equivalent to that when two fashionable ladies show up at the same cocktail party in the same "original" dress...
...Westerbeck was recently elected president of the National Society of Film Critics...
...In the middle of Tony and Stephanie's award-winning contest performance there is a twenty-bar interlude under blue lighting where they kiss tenderly...
...In this respect, the dancing reflects the problems of the film as a whole...
...Hustle, hustle...
...Neither producer Robert Stigwood, director John Badham nor scriptwriter Norman Wexler can figure out an answer...
...The record is over, too, around the time Tony does the spectacular solo which leads to that chorus line...
...at the Hollywood Dream Factory...
...Tony reverses direction in order to work in unison with one of these girls for a few bars, then changes his mind and reverses back again, improvising...
...Before we know what's happening, we are finding this stuff irresistible too, moving to its beat, grooving on its sounds...
...From Skater Dater it now declines into something more like Scorsese's Mean Streets or Hugh Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, with a pinch of Rebel Without a Cause thrown in in the person of Joey (Joseph Cali) who recreates the role originated by Sal Mineo...
...As they alternately flash into the lens and recede back in perfect time, we realize that this fever Tony has is highly contagious...
...The interlude is of course only to be taken as a subjective ex"°rience, a lyrical expression of feelings for which the dancing is now mere metaphor...
...With another, he does an intricate series of side steps to block her way until she'll give him a smile...
...On the superficial level that we know him, or anyone, just from watching him walk down the street, the whole world might indeed be a disco hustle, as this movie asks us to suppose...
...Hustle, hustle...
...Tony's destination is the hardware store where he works and where a customer has been waiting while, she thinks, Tony goes to the stockroom...
...Since this world is the only one about which they have inside information, the film is at once lost...
...By then the filmmakers have used up all the resources there are in disco atmosphere and we have had about as much of the non-stop disco beat as a body can take...
...Having no one else to retaliate on, mother passes the blow along to Tony's little sister, which re-arouses Tony's father so that he starts the sequence all over by going after Tony again...
...This in turn irritates Tony's father, who cuffs Tony's mother for making a smart remark...
...Actually, he's popped out to pick up the paint she wants from another store, and now he tells her he's going to let her have it for a dollar off the regular price, which turns out to be four dollars more than he paid retail at the other store...
...As striking as Saturday Night Fever is for its first twenty minutes or so, there is never really anything "original" in the kind of lyricism found in such films...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...The enjoyable implication in the scene is that all of life is a disco hustle, and Saturday Night Fever is in good shape as long as it keeps playing this same tune...
...You just order it direct from the Stock Shot Dept...
Vol. 105 • January 1978 • No. 2
