Product: Dirty Dancing (1987)
Rating: 5.0
A Great Romantic Musical Gets Top Drawer DVD Treatment
In the summer of 1963 we meet Francis Houseman (Jennifer Grey), a shy, bookish, virginal, idealistic young woman, and the apple of her doctor daddy's eye. She's the sort of girl, even in her late teens, everyone still calls "Baby" and it doesn't bother her. Baby travels with her family to a spendy resort hotel in the Catskills for three weeks vacation that, though she knows it not, will change her life forever. There she meets dance instructor Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze). It's a classic mismatch. He's a tough, talented kid from Phillie who's led a hardscrabble life. She's, well, Baby.It's immense attraction at first sight, for her at least. He by contrast thinks she must be a typical worthless rich girl. Johnny and his fellow instructor/ex-girlfriend/surrogate sister Penny spend their days teaching sedate, boring dances to sedate, boring people, and in the nights blow it off at parties in the staff quarters with loud, hard driving music and the sort of sinuous, close, steamy, erotic, go for broke dancing they're really capable of. The staff quarters and parties are, of course, strictly off limits to guests - until Baby wanders in one starcrossed night.Through circumstances quite believable, Baby winds up having to sub for Penny at one of her and Johnny's gigs. This is important, no one else can do it, innocent people will truly suffer if Baby doesn't save the day, and with a heart as big as all outdoors she can't let that happen. Besides, it means she gets to spend time with Johnny. Problem: she's naturally awkward - or so she thinks - and doesn't know how to dance at all. In the best scenes in the film, Johnny has to teach her to dance, and these two very different people, from two different worlds, begin to fall in love.This is a wonderful love story, a comedy, a drama, and a musical, all rolled into one. The dance numbers are a metaphor for Baby's coming of age, her awakening sexuality, as a good girl turns into a good woman. All Baby and Johnny's dancing is done by the actors, there are no doubles. Patrick Swayze was already an experienced professional dancer, appearing among other things as Danny in Grease on Broadway. Jennifer, though she'd taken dance classes as a child, had never performed before anyone except the other kids in dance class years before - until Dirty Dancing required her to do it in front of 100 cast and crew and 350 extras.The DVD looks great, the quality of audio and visual transfer high, the soundtrack crisp and clear, the colors vibrant. This is all-important in a movie relying so much for its success on color and movement and a great soundtrack. Speaking of which, Dirty Dancing has the soundtrack from Hell. 14 preexisting old songs were used in the film, and another seven, maintaining the early 60s sound extraordinarily well, were written especially for it. The soundtrack sold one million copies in its first five weeks of release, rocketing to Billboard's number one slot above Michael Jackson's Thriller. Eventually two soundtracks were released, selling over 20 million units combined, and becoming the first time in history two soundtracks from the same movie both cracked the Top Ten.Dirty Dancing was made on a shoestring budget of 5.2 million, which would just about pay for the catering on "bigger" films not possessing one hundredth of its gentle sentimentality, style and energy. It grossed 170 million dollars worldwide. Just goes to prove you don't need a huge budget when a movie has a great script and direction, excellent choreography, talented and enthusiastic performers, and that quality difficult to define but impossible to mistake or ignore: heart.