This one was something of a shock to me.

Rating: 9/10 (10 May 2001)

Every time I take a film class, I see five or six films that I would otherwise probably never have watched, and Saturday Night Fever was one of the films that I saw for a class I'm taking about Italian Cinema, and I was surprised at how good it is! To me, this movie never evoked any interest because I don't find anything interesting about disco dancing and I don't think John Travolta is the most fetching actor in the world. Clearly, he hasn't exactly had the most enviable career. But Saturday Night Fever is not about dancing, there is just so much more to it.
There can be no doubt about the irony of Travolta starring in a film in which he is the best dancer in town while he is at the height of his awkward youth, but like I said, the movie is not just about dancing. The dancing is a backdrop for a much deeper meaning. The movie has violence, blood, death, crime, sex, nudity, everything that you would almost automatically expect to be absent from a film like this. I thought it was going to be some goofy romance (made goofy by Travolta, of course. Can you even imagine him in a romantic comedy?), I mean, it has romance, but the movie is so much more.
Saturday Night Fever is a very realist film about a young Italian kid who lives in a run-down neighborhood in Brooklyn and who is trying to find meaning in his life, which is virtually meaningless when he is off the dance floor. He has a crappy job, no education beyond high school, an unhappy life at home, and no prospects for the future. His concept of the future is what he's going to wear to the dance hall (charmingly named 2001 Odyssey) on Saturday night. Clearly, outside the dance hall, he is not the hero that he is on the dance floor. Early in the film, Tony (Travolta) is walking down the street and he runs back to talk to a girl that he walked past, and she blows him off, seeming to be annoyed by him (which is weird, because who could resist a disco stud carrying a paint can!). Yet when he is at the dance hall, the crowd parts for him, girls ask if they can wipe the sweat off his forehead, he is the king.
The costumes are excellent, from the first frames of the film that show Tony walking down the street in his hilariously disco outfit and all throughout the film. I remember one scene where one of Tony's geeky friends, Bobby, lets Tony borrow his car, and then as Bobby walks away, you can see that he has on what have to be the most ludicrous disco shoes ever created. Tony's meticulous care about his outfit is made clear when he wears a sheet wrapped around himself to the dinner table, and then gets upset not that his father hit him, but that he hit his HAIR. `I spend a lot of time on my hair, and you hit it.' However, no matter how hard he tries, he does NOT look like Al Pacino.
(spoilers) But on a deeper level, Saturday Night Fever has to do with everything from doing what you want to do with your own life to loyalty among friends to religious persecution and hypocrisy. There is also some substantial symbolism in that bridge that Tony knows so much about and which Bobby doesn't seem to have been mature enough to cross late in the film. `It's a dog eat dog world,' and Saturday Night Fever uses dancing as only one among many techniques to deliver that message. The film is dated in many ways, but it remains a landmark film, especially concerning the Italian experience in America in the 70s, and is definitely worth a look.