The Fifties As They Should Have Been

Rating: 7/10 (4 February 2011)

Despite occasional revivals, the early seventies marked the end of the cultural dominance of the traditional Broadway-style musical film. ("Fiddler on the Roof" and "Cabaret" were the last two great examples). "Grease" was perhaps the nearest equivalent in the second half of the decade. Although it uses popular music rather than the quasi-classical music of Gershwin or Rodgers and Hammerstein, it shares two features in common with earlier Hollywood musicals which set it apart from the dance-based musicals of the late seventies and eighties like "Saturday Night Fever", "Fame", "Flashdance" or "Dirty Dancing". Firstly, it is based on an earlier stage musical. Secondly, it uses songs in a non-naturalistic way as a means of commenting on the action and of demonstrating the characters' emotions, unlike the dance musicals in which the characters only sing and dance in situations where people would sing and dance in real life.
The film is set in 1959 in the fictitious Rydell High School and tells the story of a romance between two of the pupils, Danny Zuko and Sandy Olsson. (Sandy is an Australian, a detail presumably invented to allow Olivia Newton-John to avoid having to attempt an American accent; the equivalent character in the original stage version was American). Also featuring are Danny's gang, the T-Birds, and their female counterparts, the Pink Ladies. As is common in American high school movies supposedly teenage characters are played by actors in their twenties or thirties. Stockard Channing in particular looks more like a member of the PTA than of the student body.
Recent films about the 1950s, such as "Far from Heaven" and "Revolutionary Road", have tended to take a negative view of the decade, seeing it as a period of hypocrisy and social repression. In the seventies and eighties, however, film-makers were inclined to take a more positive view, partly because the studios were still under the control of a more conservative generation who had grown up before the social changes of the sixties, and partly because of the trauma of the Vietnam War which led Americans to see the period immediately preceding that war as a lost golden age. Like "Diner", a film from a few years later also set in late 1959, "Grease" looks at the fifties through rose-tinted spectacles.
The title derives from the fact that the film celebrates the "greaser" subculture of the era. "Greasers" were young men who adopted a distinctive look involving leather jackets and the greased-back hair from which they took their name; they were generally lovers of motorcycles, fast cars and rock music. (In America they appear to have adopted the "greaser" name as a badge of pride, but in Britain their preferred name was "rockers", "greaser" being an insult hurled at them by followers of rival youth gangs such as mods and skinheads). One of the most popular television programmes in the seventies and early eighties was "Happy Days", which featured another "greaser" character, Fonzie, played by Henry Winkler. Winkler was offered the role of Danny but declined it, apparently because he did not want to become typecast.
Winkler's loss was John Travolta's gain, as "Grease" helped him consolidate the reputation he had won in "Saturday Night Fever" the previous year as Hollywood's coolest young actor. The success of the film's soundtrack also gave a massive boost to Newton-John's career as a singer, although her acting career never really took off in the same way, possibly because her follow-up to "Grease" was the forgettable "Xanadu". (Forgettable, that is, to all except trivia quiz junkies desperately in need of an answer to the question "Name a film beginning with X", and even that need has since been undermined by the X-Men franchise).
The film's music, in fact, is really better than its plot, which is no more than a standard boy-girl romance reminiscent of sixties beach movies. Some of its cultural references now seem very dated; I am not sure why the scriptwriters were so keen to satirise the long-forgotten Sandra Dee, admittedly a huge star in 1959 but by 1978 already a prime candidate for "Where Are They Now?" There are no really great acting performances, but all the stars do what is expected of them. The real star is the music, based on the popular music of the era and unfailingly cheerful and high-spirited. Some of the songs have become classics, such as "Greased Lightning" "You're the One That I Want", the love-ballad "Hopelessly Devoted to You" and the witty "Summer Nights" in which Danny and Sandy independently tell their friends about their romance from different viewpoints. (As might be expected, the boys are obsessed with sex, the girls with romance).
There are some similarities between "Grease" and "Absolute Beginners", a British musical from eight years later also set in the late fifties. In terms of their visual style the two films are very different, and the soundtrack to "Absolute Beginners" is based around jazz rather than rock. (It deals not with the rockers but with their "mod" rivals for whom jazz was the music of choice). The British film also makes some serious points about racism; "Grease" does not really tackle social issues, apart from a minor subplot about teenage pregnancy. What the two films have in common is that both present an irresistible, upbeat celebration of youth culture; what we see in them is not so much the fifties as they actually were but the fifties as they should have been. 7/10