Vinnie Barbarino is Buddy Love

Rating: 6/10 (1 June 2006)

This is a coming of age film with a 23 year old actor playing a 19 year old in the lead role of tony, a 19 year paint store clerk who is obsessed with spending his Saturday nights on the dance floor of a Brooklyn discotheque. He can shake up a can of paint and he can shake it up on the dance floor but has little else going on. He does have a 19 year old girl, Annette, played by a 23 year old actress over at the disco who is obsessed with him but he is attracted to a 20 year old woman, Stephanie, played by a 32 year old actress who he wants as his dance partner in a competition. The actors who play Tony's presumably same-age buddies from the Italian neighborhood are 25 and 27 years old and the third one is actually 19 years old. The story is based on a story by Nik Cohn that appeared in the June 7, 1976 New York Magazine that was passed off as a true story called Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night. Cohn had gone to the 2001 Odyssey disco in Brooklyn to look for material for a story on the disco scene. He saw an impeccably dressed and coiffed dancer who stood out among the crowd and came back the next week to look for him but he wan't there and he couldn't learn anything about him. He knew nothing about the disco scene so he ditched his plan and decided to make up a story using the guy he had seen as the model for his character he called Vincent. Producer Robert Stigwood read this story and figured it would be a good movie and he could score the music to it from The Bee Gees who were under his contract. Norman Wexler who had written the screenplays for Serpico and Joe adapted the short story into a screenplay. Rocky director John G. Avildsen was hired to direct but his differences in how the Tony character should be written with Stigwood's vision got him fired and replaced by John Badham who had recent success with The Bingo Long Travelling All-Stars & Motor Kings. John Travolta who was well known from the Welcome Back Kotter TV comedy was just starting out in films. He had done two TV movies and had a starring role in one of them and had been in two theatrical release feature films including the popular Carrie. Most of the other actors in this film were unknowns recently starting out in films or making their screen debut. Dance instructor Deney Terrio worked with Travolta and actresses Karen Lynn Gorney and Donna Pescow on the latest disco dance moves and additional training for the cast was from former Broadway actor and choreographer JoJo Smith who had been in the '64 revival of West Side Story and was running JoJo's Dance Factory in New York. Lester Wilson choreographed all the dance sequences. He had choreographed such films as Funny Lady and Sparkle and would go on to do the films Scrooged, Sister Act and the Motown 25 TV special. All their work hardly pays off as this film shows no real love for dancing. The characters are all going through the moves and it's energetic but their is no fun displayed in what they're doing for us to understand why they do it. Cinematographer Ralph D. Bode films the dance sequences in a point and shoot manner with poor lighting and little imagination. The Bee Gees of course provide a bulk of the soundtrack which went on to be the biggest selling movie soundtrack of all time. Lot's of songs by other artists too. Stayin' Alive, Night Fever, More Than A Woman, Disco Inferno, If I Can't Have you, You Should Be Dancing, How Deep is Your love and many more familiar tunes throughout this film. It's amazing that no songs from this film were nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Song which was won that year by the diametrically opposed You Light Up My Life by Debbie Boone. Travolta did get an Oscar nomination but throughout the film I keep imagining him in this role as Vinnie Barbarino doing the Jerry Lewis character Buddy Love from The Nutty Professor. This film hit the disco era in full stride and it was perfect timing. Oddly there had been no disco flavored music films but a flood would follow like Fame, Village People Can't Stop the Music, Roller Boogie, Soup for One, The Apple, The Wiz and Xanadu that all hit as disco was fading. I saw this film during it's initial theatrical release and it is a good snapshot of the 70's disco era but as a story and as a film it falls short. I would give this a 6.5 out of 10.