"You make it with some of these chicks, they think you gotta dance with them."
Tony (John Travolta)
John Travolta was becoming a household name when "Saturday Night Fever" premiered on this day in 1977.
His career had been gathering momentum with his appearance in "Carrie" and his regular role on TV's Welcome Back, Kotter. Then "Saturday Night Fever" became a blockbuster — the fifth–highest grossing movie of 1977 — and Travolta's career took off. After an appearance in the very forgettable "Moment by Moment," his next two movies, "Grease" and "Urban Cowboy," were huge hits.
I don't think Travolta ever played a character quite like Tony Manero.
At the Brooklyn disco where he spent his evenings, Tony was the ruler of all he surveyed. Outside the disco, he was nobody — even in his own home. It was safe to say that he lived for those moments in the disco and that he gave little if any thought to the future. Outside the disco he got into fights with his father and struggled to live up to the example of his brother the priest.
And his job at a paint store was a dead end.
But that all changed when he was in the club. As I say, he lived for the moment there.
Things were different when he met Stephanie (Karen Gorney) whose thoughts and dreams took her beyond Brooklyn and the club. The fact that Tony didn't envision a life beyond Brooklyn frustrated Stephanie, who replaced Annette (Donna Pescow).
"You live with your parents," she told Tony at one point, "you hang with your buddies and on Saturday nights you burn it all off at 2001 Odyssey. You're a cliche. You're nowhere, goin' no place."
Tony wanted to argue, but what could he say? He knew she was right. And that was his turning point.
What was less clear was what Tony's future treatment of women would be. Like many men of his generation — as well as generations before and since — Tony struggled to relate to women outside the bedroom or the dance floor. While the Tonys of the world are getting paid back today in the form of sexual harassment scandals, I doubt that a movie like "Saturday Night Fever" could be made today. After all there was overt as well as covert sexism going on in that movie that would not be permissible in today's politically correct–charged atmosphere.
"Saturday Night Fever" supposedly told the story of the social scene in the U.S. in the '70s, but ironically it was based on a 1976 article by British journalist Nik Cohn that Cohn admitted — 20 years later — had been fabricated.
"Without Cohn's original story, it's possible that disco would be a dimly remembered fad from the days of the Ford administration: no Bee Gees megahits, no Travolta superstardom, no nostalgic polyester parties for decades ever after," observed Mark Rozzo in the New York Times. "Barry Gibb reportedly once said to Cohn, 'It's all your bloody fault, isn't it?' He may have been right."
Travolta received the movie's only Oscar nomination — for Best Actor — but he couldn't compete with Richard Burton, Woody Allen, Marcello Mastroianni and the winner, Richard Dreyfuss.
The best–selling soundtrack featuring songs recorded mostly (but not exclusively) by the Bee Gees received no Oscar nominations. Nevertheless it is one of the bestselling movie soundtrack albums of all time.
And it is a testament to the influence of disco music on '70s America — even if that influence was exaggerated at times.
