A Toe-Tapping Cult Masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (20 October 2011)

Kevin Bacon plays a rebel with a cause in "Steel Magnolias" director Herbert Ross's teenage dance musical "Footloose." Our high school age hero arouses the wrath of the city fathers when he tries to abolish a certain sacred city ordinance. Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Ren MacCormack finds himself uprooted when his mom returns to her rural hometown of Bomont, Utah, after her husband abandons her. This oppressive Utah town bans rock 'n roll music, high school dancing sans chaperons, and students out past curfew. The status quo also frowns on 'inappropriate' literature, specifically "Slaughterhouse-Five," and they have fired English teachers for assigning controversial books like the Kurt Vonnegut novel. If our fish-out-of-water protagonist didn't have a hard enough time, Ren must contend with a righteous, killjoy, minister, the latter's rebellious daughter, the local constabulary, and haughty high school administrators. This lively PG-rated tale contains some profanity, a men's locker room shower scene with bare bottoms, examples of suicidal behavior, and some of the most memorable pop tunes from the 1980s. Indeed, the Kenny Loggins' song "Footloose" and the Tom Snow song "Let's Hear it for the Boy" received Academy Award nominations for best original music. Lyricist Dean Pitchford co-wrote both songs with Loggins and Snow in addition to penning the screenplay. Earlier, Pitchford shared an Oscar statute with Michael Gore for the Best Song for "Fame."
After Ren MacCormack arrives in Bomont, he learns to his chagrin that he can get in trouble for playing loud music in his yellow Volkswagen Beetle. No sooner has Ren shown up for school than he encounters his first critic, Willard Hewitt (Christopher Penn of "True Romance"), but they wind up become pals despite their vast differences. Meanwhile, the preacher's daughter Ariel Moore (Lori Singer of "Summer Heat") and her best friend Rusty (Sarah Jessica Parker of "Sex and the City") like what they see because Ren doesn't dress like everybody else. These gals aren't the only ones making eyes at Ren. His uncle's adolescent daughter Amy calls Ren 'a fox' and wants to give him a potato at diner. Unfortunately for Ren, he runs afoul of Ariel's hell-raising boyfriend Chuck Cranston (Jim Youngs of "Hotshot") and his marijuana puffing pals and Chuck challenges Ren to a game of chicken at his father's property where they drive tractors at each other with Ren on a John Deere and Chuck a Dual. Ren's sneaker shoestring get snagged and he cannot bail out. This stroke of luck prompted Chuck to bail out first and Ren wins.
As it turns out, Ariel is a hellion herself. Early in the action, she straddles Chuck's pick-up truck and her friend's car as they race down a two-lane blacktop highway with an 18-wheeler bearing down on them. This is one of the most exciting scenes in "Footloose." Later, Ariel plays chicken with a train and Ren has to knock her out of the way at the last minute. Anyway, one of Chuck's friends try to get Ren in trouble in school by slipping him a marijuana joint and a school faculty member spots the joint in Ren's fingers. He chases Ren into a toilet stall but is too late to confiscate the evidence. This entire scene is handled more adeptly in the remake. Eventually, Ren decides to take Ariel, Rusty, and Willard out of town to a bar where dancing is allowed and he learns that Willard cannot dance a lick. When Ren decides to change the city ordinance against dancing, he challenges Willard to learn how to dance.
Meanwhile, Reverend Moore slaps his hellion of a daughter during an argument and sets his own wife, Vi Moore (Dianne Wiest of "The Lost Boys"), against him. She challenges Shaw to improve his one-on-one skills. You see, the Reverend has been a power broker in Bomont in that he helped pass the ordinance forbidding dancing and cacophonous music. Secretly, Shaw finds himself struggling to be a Sheppard watching over the town. Sadly, for Ren, his petition to change the no dancing law fails, but he is approached by his boss who runs the The Lehi Rollermills, a flour mill just outside the Bomont City limits. They fix up the mill and arrange to have the dance there. On the night of the dance, after the Moores have allowed Ariel to attend, Chuck and his cronies show up to spoil things, but they run into more than they asked for and get solidly whipped. Part of the beauty of "Footloose" is that Ren doesn't get to change the city ordinance, but he is permitted to throw his dance. Reverend Moore emerges as a round character because he changes during the process and asks for God's blessings and prayers to guide the youth while they are at the dance.
Director Herb Ross doesn't wear out his welcome with this quasi-melodramatic, 107-minute opus, and the cast delivers strong performances. Several barely known thespians who shined aside from the leaping and lunging Bacon were future "Sex in the City" starlet Sarah Jessica Parker, Sean Penn's late brother Christopher, and John Lithgow as the minister who astonished audiences with his work in "Terms of Endearment." Budgeted at a mere $8 million, "Footloose" reportedly coined over $80 million at the box office. "Footloose" was one of a number of hit movies loaded with a Top-40 play list, like "Saturday Night Fever" and "Flashdance" that stormed theaters in the 1980s when MTV was changing the way people looked and listened to music. Hard as it is to believable, "Footloose" was almost shot down before it was released. Furthermore, Kevin Bacon was not the studio's first choice. Indeed, Madonna auditioned for the role that Lori Singer wound up playing.