Stigwood's Legacy

Rating: Null/10 (2 February 2006)

The Beatles tried it and failed. They, especially Paul, saw movies as a sort of music, or at least a sibling of music. They saw how naturally and effectively they were able to change the world. So they tried movies, and it was a disaster. ("Hard Day's Night" wasn't theirs. I'm talking "Magical Mystery Tour" here.)
But it got a lot of entertainment heavyweights thinking if something better could be done than those stupid Elvis movies. Robert Stigwood had built a record empire. (In those days it was black plastic.) And he thought he could make big hits by thinking about movies the way he thought about record albums.
So we have this and "Grease" as successes, and a few failures as well, including the BeeGees as Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Whew, that's a rough one.
But this one changed the world of movies. Music and movies always have had a dance of possibilities, mostly built around two models. Either the music was part of a realistic story, like when Micky and Judy "put on a show" so you have the show and some events surrounding (usually threatening) it. And you have a stagy otherworld -- a peoples opera -- where the world of the story and that of the music blend.
This is sort of in between, more like a show within, but there's a magic in the notion that the story more than wraps the show, it is a striving to actually pull the ordinary world into the world of music and dance.
Its what I call a clever fold. We the audience identify with Manero who strives to take his mundane life and make it a magical, transporting show. Just like (exactly like) we were yearning to turn our own lives into something like we associated with movieland.
So it works. And it was a first of this new model -- and also a new mode of promotion. It is a touchstone. But actually it isn't that good a movie. Some of the style has passed us by. We all used to know that Travolta character, and he's been replaced with a different, more dangerous and broken stereotype now. And we don't tolerate much now without what we call irony, a different sort of fold, dismissive.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.