Slipped Disco

...While Tony is dancing, the music blares...

...But on Saturday nights, Tony manages to escape his dreary existence for a few hours...

...When they win, Tony is supposedly so disillusioned by the hollowness of their victory that he gives the trophy and the prize money to the runners-up (a Puerto Rican couple he feels was denied first place because of racial prejudice...

...Along with the nervous grin, a flicker of apprehension can be discerned in his eyes: He is genuinely acting the part from within, instead of merely adopting the superficial aspects of the role —swagger, false bravado, street-wise gestures—that any ham could pick up...

...Quinn Cummings, a precocious kid, plays a precocious kid in the most irritating manner since Tatum O'Neal...

...Yet Badham stages and photographs their big number as a slow-motion, soft-focus pas de deux—a sappily romantic interlude that runs counter to the events immediately leading up to it...

...His partner, Stephanie, is a pretentious social climber who flaunts her experience, age and ambitions, and through condescension and mockery further sows seeds of discontent in Tony...

...One of the Faces, following a very brief encounter, even asks his partner, "What did you say your name was...

...Simon's notion of a joke is that the director (Paul Benedict) wants Elliot to play the part as a flaming homosexual...

...The result is the kind of limp-wristed, prancing and lisping parody that hasn't been seen on screen (except in self-mockery) in years...

...To take the most blatant instance, Elliot is an aspiring actor who has come to New York to star in an Off-Off-Broadway production of Richard III...

...Then, as inevitably as clockwork, they wind up at 2001 Odyssey, the local discotheque, where Tony transforms himself into king of the dance floor...

...He doesn't need the money or the fame, and we don't need his brand of humor...

...The inarticulate, sensitive spirit, trapped inside a leather jacket and strangled by a Brooklyn accent, has been a stock figure of the genre regrettably revived here since On the Waterfront...

...The article, however, demonstrated that the children of lower-middle-class white ethnics, who tend to go directly from high school into menial employment without ever leaving their home or neighborhood, were hardly affected by the social upheavals of the 1960s and particularly not by the revolution of rising expectations...

...In one scene, Stephanie is skeptical when Tony claims to be 20 years old, so he backtracks and admits, "Actually, I'm 19 at the moment...

...Wexler's script supplies the usual lame explanations (parental conflict, sibling rivalry), then proceeds to plunge Tony into a family crisis, a meaningless gang war, the death of a friend, and not one but two disastrous sexual episodes...

...in The Goodbye Girl, however, it is positively atavistic...

...To drive home their point about the burden of working-class sexual mores and Catholic guilt, they stage several extremely crude sex scenes in the back seat of a car...

...Incredibility is compounded by the casting of Karen Lynn Gorney as Stephanie...

...The writer's humor has always been a throwback to an earlier brand of Broadway gag-writing...

...That is not really remarkable, considering he has spent most of his 23 years in the New York area...

...Yet another odd couple, Elliot (Richard Dreyfuss) and Paula (Marsha Mason), "meet cute," and a slightly fantastic plot contrivance forces them to share an apartment...

...Simon, and Richard Dreyfuss, whose successful movie career ranks among the great mysteries in the history of acting...

...This is the story of Saturday Night Fever, a movie based on a slick piece of New Journalism in New York magazine: "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night," by rock critic Nik Cohn...

...His talents, such as they are, clearly lie elsewhere...

...The character of Tony is equally stale...

...Badham no doubt engineered this to make conversations easier to hear, but it is inconsistent with the rest of the movie: It undercuts the "high" Tony is supposed to feel from the moment he walks in the disco door—the total experience that sets off 2001 Odyssey from his daily existence...

...In a film, the characters' attitudes must be given a relevant visual context...

...The treatment of sex is an example...

...in a play, the dialogue can provide the context...

...As for her aristocratic pronunciation, it's exaggerated to the point of comedy...

...I wish Simon would give us a break and retire from screenwriting...

...His characters' lives do not connect with anything we see, only with what we hear...

...as soon as he steps off the floor, even if it is in the middle of a song, the volume immediately drops...

...To him, New York means a cramped apartment, where beleaguered couples battle each other and the outside world...

...He is simply superb on the dance floor, and he has the Brooklyn accent down pat...

...Apart from this impressive performance, the sole surprise in Saturday Night Fever is its benign view of Manhattan...

...After practicing for weeks, Tony enters a big-money dance contest at the disco...

...John Travolta, as Tony, is a much more felicitous choice...

...The Goodbye Girl might have been aided by a good cast, but Simon's rotten script is matched by the performances of Marsha Mason, whose two qualifications are her snub nose and her legal status as Mrs...

...Naturally, they fall in love...

...But now that he lives in California, Simon seems to have forgotten what little he used to know about the City...

...But Tony and Stephanie's performance was so "beautiful" that it is difficult to see why he got so upset...

...How such a diamond got lost in the rough to begin with is never made clear...

...But because The Goodbye Girl is a movie rather than a stage play, director Herbert Ross was forced to "open up" the screenplay with exteriors and location shooting...

...Manhattan can still serve as the promised land for malcontents from Brooklyn, still be a place to escape to rather than from...

...What I did not expect, having suffered through Welcome Back Hotter, was Travolta's firm grasp on the character of Tony...

...Travolta is scheduled to appear next as the lead in the movie version of Grease, but it would be a shame if he were locked into playing a sensitive working-class hero...

...But the more serious dislocation is psychological...

...Wexler and Badham are not content to have Tony announce that there are two kinds of women—"nice girls and cunt...

...The film, written by Norman Wexler and directed by John Bad-ham, is full of anachronisms, embarrassing sentiment and simple-minded social realism...

...although Manhattan is a short subway ride away, it might as well be a different continent...

...Moreover, Elliot and Paula's flat appears to jump from neighborhood to neighborhood, although one of Simon's lines announces that it is situated in the 70s off Amsterdam Avenue...

...That would at least provide some explanation for the eerie sense of dislocation one gets from watching The Goodbye Girl, for which he wrote the script...

...Under the burden of so many potentially ennobling experiences, any young punk in Brooklyn would emerge a tragic hero...

...In typical Simon fashion, most of the story takes place indoors...

...The joke, though, is on Simon if he thinks such dubious humor amuses anyone except the most low-minded...

...By the night of the contest, Tony has few illusions left—about her, himself, or his pathetic weekend ritual...

...A year after graduating high school, he is "a nobody on the way to nowhere...

...This is no minor complaint...

...Her terpsichorean skill being less than exciting, it is hard to believe her solo dancing was what attracted Tony in the first place...

...He and his gang, the Faces, cruise the neighborhood, defend their turf against invading Puerto Rican gangs, and perform foolishly dangerous acrobatic stunts on the railings of the Verrazano Bridge...

...Apparently the creators are laboring under the old social-realist delusion that ugliness, especially regarding sex, is dramatically revealing and truthful...

...Tony's awareness of any larger possibilities in life has been all but squashed between the tight boundaries of his Italian community...

...The director's incompetence is also on display in the scene that triggers the movie's climax...

...To his boss at the local hardware store, he is barely worth a $2-a-week raise...

...Perhaps fag-baiting is still in style in sunny California, or in the fantasy land of Simon's mind...

...Unfortunately, his version of Manhattan bears no resemblance whatsoever to the city I live in...

...Part of the trouble is purely geographical...

...Niel Simon, of course, always has taken a dimmer view of Manhattan...

...To his parents, he is a disappointment compared to his older brother, a priest...

...The Goodbye Girl shows that Simon remains a playwright rather than a screenwriter...

...Stephanie ends up working and eventually living there, and in the last scene of the film Tony joins her...

...Badham's direction does not help matters...