Good but flawed

Rating: 8/10 (14 February 2019)

Australian nice girl Sandy has a summer holiday romance with Danny, and ends up going to the same high school, to their mutual surprise, only to find that peer pressure leads Danny to be a crass sexist rather than the nice lad she had encountered. The scool year features many irrelevant digressions - car remodelling, a televised dance contest, a pregnancy scare, a hotrod race - before Sandy disovers that the way to her man's heart is to dress like a slut and start smoking.
Grease tops tge cgarts for a l9t of people. I undestand why - it has some great musical numbers, well staged, and some winning from performanes from, especially, John, Travolta, Stockard Channing, and Eve Arden. But i find it flawed.
One, this high school teenagers are all, obviously, at least a decade older than the characters they are playing. Two, Oliver, Newton and John is both lovely and sexy, sings prettily and dances competently, but doesn't command the screen in the same way her co-star does. Three, the film delivers a mixed message. It shows us both wholesome purity and slutty promiscuity, and seems to endorse and deplore both. Colour me confused, ditto any teen trying to use this film as a route map to negotiate a way through those difficult years of sexual uncertaintty. Four, the episodic digressions which comprise the centre of tye film are barely, if at all, linked to the central Danny/Sandy plot.
The mus8c remains great fun, though.