Excellent urban drama that is far more confrontational than many assume

Rating: 9/10 (24 October 2016)

Saturday Night Fever is a film whose image and reputation suggests something very different to what it turns out to be. It often sort of gets associated with John Travolta's other music themed blockbuster from the time, namely 1978's mega-hit Grease. But the similarities between the two are frankly entirely superficial, as where Grease is a feel-good musical that looks back nostalgically on a bygone era, Saturday Night Fever is a gritty urban drama with a music back-drop that takes a decidedly unglamorous contemporary look at the lives of a group of young city youths. Part of the reason folks sometimes forget SNF's true form is that a heavily circulated PG version of the film was released in cinemas very soon after its extremely popular soundtrack started selling millions, the idea being that loads of youngsters would flock to see this Travolta disco movie that was being promoted via the music charts with a constant string of smash hits. And the studio was right of course, so much so that this censored version even played TV for a good number of years too. So much so, I have to admit to being a little surprised when I finally saw the original version which had drug taking, some extremely frank sexual scenes, bloody violence and dialogue with healthy amounts of racist terms and full-on swearing. Needless to say, this original raw version is much preferable and makes for a tough and interesting bit of unsentimental drama.
Whatever the case, this was definitely the film that firmly put John Travolta on the map. His performance as Tony Manero is one of the most iconic of the 70's. This was the Brooklyn kid who isn't too bright and has a dead end existence, whose life is one of humiliations and restrictions. But due to his skills on the dance-floor of his local discotheque he is treated like a god. It's in many ways a coming-of-age story about a young man imprisoned by his environment and friends. It paints a very gritty portrait of 70's NYC and the young Italian-Americans at the centre of the story. It doesn't even glorify the disco era or experience, suggesting in fact that there were a good many unsavoury elements to that also. All these reasons make for a fairly complex and unpredictable drama with all characters having many flaws and feeling all the more real because of them.
It was also, for better or for worse, the film that moved disco from the underground to the mainstream. The soundtrack album sold astronomical numbers of records. The Bee Gees contributed four classic tracks, "Stayin' Alive", "Night Fever", "How Deep Is Your Love" and "More Than a Woman", all of which are integrated into the film very well. Obviously, the songs work well alongside the celebrated dance routines but, more importantly, the music was mixed in very well generally into the flow of what is contrastingly an often quite grim and confrontational drama. All-in-all, this is a film which would probably appeal to a lot of people who would never expect to like it in the first place, on the other hand it will also be too much of a downer for quite a lot of folks who think it's going to be right up their alley. Saturday Night Fever is certainly a film that will continue to confound a lot of expectations and its all the better for that.