Bacon's Starmaker Role

Rating: 6/10 (26 September 2009)

Footloose is the film that made Kevin Bacon a star. The simple premise follows a Chicago teenager and his mother to live in some town named Bomont, and it's unclear where this is exactly. However, we see snow-capped mountains in the distance, and the film was obviously made out west (Utah to be precise). Even though the story was based on a true incident from a few years before, it was probably wise not to identify the town or even state in the movie. What town would want to be associated with banning public dancing?
Lori Singer is the wild child, preacher's daughter who takes a shine to Bacon when he arrives. Trouble is she takes a shine to a lot of other guys as well. Bacon befriends Christopher Penn at school and later teaches him to dance. The kids cross the border into the next unnamed state to see what they've been missing. They rattle the town board when Bacon makes it known the seniors want the no dance ban lifted. John Lithgow, as the fire and brimstone preacher father of Singer, stands in the way, until Bacon fires off a few biblical phrases himself in his appeal with Singer's help.
The dancing is average at best, Singer's character is annoying, and the preacher is a full blown idiot with a mindset from 100 years earlier. Herbert Ross directed the film and wavered little from the formula we've come to expect from an outsider film like this. Like many films of this ilk from this era, many of the songs in it received heavy air play and helped sell the soundtrack as well as bring in an audience to the film. Two of the songs were Oscar-nominated: "Let's Hear It For The Boy" and "Footloose". **1/2 of 4 stars.