Product: Dirty Dancing (1987)
Rating: 5.0
As wonderful as I remembered
I bought this DVD for Christmas & watched it again last night - more than a decade after I had packed away my old video. It is just as wonderful as I remembered and certainly remains one of my all-time favourite films. At the risk of sounding repetitious after the 281 other reviewers I will explain why.Dirty Dancing is set in a summer resort in the Catskills in 1963, a gentler, simpler time when the world (or at least the North American middle class part of it) was innocent and nave & hovered on the cusp of vast social change. It was before the Kennedy assassination & the morass of Viet Nam, before student riots and feminism and The Pill, before the Beatles, and just as Motown music was hitting our consiousness.In 1963 swear words did not appear in print, let alone on TV. Movies and books told a story with a "moral". The good guys always won & the bad guys got their just desserts. Pregnancy out of wedlock was the greatest disaster that could befall a young girl, usually solved by her family sending her "to visit an aunt" out of state for a year, putting the baby up for adoption & drawing a veil of silence over the episode. (This actually happened to a school acquaintance of mine in 1963: everyone knew, but it was never, I repeat, NEVER, spoken of again).The film has a particular resonance for our generation who came of age at that time. The heroine was 17 years old in 1963, exactly my age then. I worked at a summer resort & knew someone just like Johnny Castle, played by Patrick Swayze in the film. I think most women have a Johnny Castle one summer in our youth.In 1987 it was mothers who dragged their protesting daughters to see the movie. It has spawned a host of imitators & remakes, the best of which is probably the Australian-made "Strictly Ballroom". There is also a recent remake "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights", set in Cuba which has a following among a new young generation although I have not seen it. Now, a new DVD of Dirty Dancing is being issued for the children & grandchildren of the original fans.Dirty Dancing bears its age well. It is well worth seeing again, besides hearing that wonderful music that threads through the film: Cry to Me, Will You Love Me Tomorrow, In the Still of the Night, Soul Man, Hungry Eyes and the finale piece "I've Had the Time of My Life" sung by one half of the Righteous Brothers duo, the golden-voiced Bill Medley.(originally submitted Jan 3,2007)