Saturday Night Fever (1977)

Saturday Night Fever is a 1977 drama film starring John Travolta as Tony Monero, an immature young man whose weekends are spent visiting a local Brooklyn discothèque; Karen Lynn Gorney as his dance partner and eventual friend (they never do date in the film and the film closes with their agreement to be friends), and Donna Pescow as Tony's former dance partner and would-be girlfriend. While in the disco, Tony is the king. His care-free youth and weekend dancing help him to temporarily forget the reality of his life: a dead-end job, clashes with his unsupportive and squabbling parents, racial tensions in the local community, and his associations with a gang of macho friends. A huge commercial success, the film significantly helped to popularize disco music around the world and made Travolta, already well known from his role on TV's Welcome Back, Kotter, a household name. The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, featuring disco songs by the Bee Gees, is the best selling soundtrack of all time. The film is the first example of cross-media marketing, with the tie-in soundtrack's single being used to help promote the film before its release and the film popularizing the entire soundtrack after its release. The film also showcased aspects of the music, the dancing, and the subculture surrounding the disco era: symphony-orchestrated melodies, haute-couture styles of clothing, pre-AIDS sexual promiscuity, and graceful choreography. The story is based upon a 1976 New York magazine article by British writer Nik Cohn, "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night". In the late 1990s, Cohn acknowledged that the article had been fabricated. A newcomer to the United States and a stranger to the disco lifestyle, Cohn was unable to make any sense of the subculture he had been assigned to write about. The characters who became Tony Manero and his friends were based on Mods, a British youth movement that also placed great importance on music, clothes, and dancing.

19-year-old Tony Manero (John Travolta) is a skirt-chasing Italian American from the New York City neighborhood of Bay Ridge in Brooklyn. Tony lives at home with his bickering and demeaning parents (Val Bisoglio and Julie Bovasso) and works at a dead-end job in a small hardware store. But on Saturday nights Tony rules the dance floor with his frequent appearances at 2001 Odyssey, a local discotheque. Tony has four close friends: Joey (Joseph Cali); Double J. (Paul Pape); Gus (Bruce Ornstein); and the diminutive Bobby C. (Barry Miller), the only one of them who is still in high school. Bobby C. is part of the group because he is the only one with a car (a run-down 1964 Chevrolet Impala). An informal member of their group is Annette (Donna Pescow), a neighborhood girl who has been Tony's partner in previous dance competitions and longs for a more permanent and physical relationship with him. Tony has an older brother, Frank Jr., pride of the family, who is a priest in the Catholic Church. Knowing Annette has the right moves to win an upcoming dance contest, Tony agrees to be her partner when she recruits him for the competition, much to Annette's delight. Her happiness is short-lived, however, when Tony dumps Annette after seeing Stephanie Mangano (Karen Lynn Gorney) dance at the disco and later at a neighborhood dance studio. Stephanie is an older, talented dancer with an upper-class aura, and Tony, infatuated, believes she can help him win the competition. Despite an initially frosty and superior attitude toward Tony, and after much urging, Stephanie agrees to partner with him in the competition, but not otherwise. Stephanie works as a secretary for a magazine publisher in Manhattan and is poised to move there, where she has more opportunities to work her way up. She even talks about meeting celebrities like Joe Namath and David Bowie at the offices of the magazine she works for. These discussions embarrass Tony for his lack of culture and connections, but also awaken a desire in him to transcend his Bay Ridge, Brooklyn working-class roots, yet do not overcome his reluctance to change. However, Stephanie ultimately reveals her own vulnerabilities to Tony, and that leaves its mark. Bobby C., who looks up to Tony, asks him for advice for getting out of his relationship with his devoutly Catholic girlfriend, Pauline, who is pregnant with his child. Though Tony tells him to dump her, Bobby C. faces pressure from his family and others to marry her, which he clearly does not wish to do. After she refuses to get an abortion, Bobby asks Tony's older priest brother, Frank Jr. (who only recently has returned home having recently left the priesthood) if the Pope would grant him dispensation for an abortion. Bobby's feelings of despair deepen when Frank tells him dispensation would be highly unlikely. When another member of their gang is beaten up and put in a hospital, apparently by some Puerto Rican youths, Tony, Double J. and Joey vow revenge and brawl with the Puerto Ricans in a bar frequented by the rival Barracuda gang, only finding out later that they may have targeted the wrong people. At the dance competition, Tony believes that a dazzling Puerto Rican couple won the competition, but the top prize is awarded to him and Stephanie. Furious about the injustice, as he regards dance as a serious art and believes the judges' decision was based on racism, Tony gives the Puerto Ricans the prize and storms out of Odyssey 2001, raging at the club, his friends, and his family. Dragging Stephanie along with him, he makes a crude attempt to force himself on her in the car, an effort that ends when she fights him off and escapes. He then sullenly takes off with the gang, along with a drunk and high Annette, who Joey says is going to "give everybody a piece," evidently as retribution for Tony's refusal to be with her. Double J. and Joey both take turns with Annette, but Annette starts to cry and to struggle as she comes down from the drugs she had been given and comes to realize she did not want to have sex with them and it was mostly an attempt to render Tony jealous. They pull the car off onto the shoulder at the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Bobby C., who normally stays in the car, joins them and is attempting more dangerous stunts than Tony, Double J., and Joey had tried on the supporting structure of the bridge. Realizing that Bobby is recklessly acting out, Tony tries to coax him off the railing. But upset at his lonely life, his situation with Pauline, and a broken promise from Tony earlier that he would call him, the needy Bobby issues a tirade at Tony's lack of care before slipping and falling to his death in the Narrows more than two hundred feet below. The friends are shocked and grief-stricken. When a detective investigating the incident asks Tony if he thinks Bobby C. committed suicide, Tony responds obliquely, "There are ways of killin' yourself, without killin' yourself." After leaving his friends behind, a distraught Tony spends the rest of the night riding the subway. He finally shows up at Stephanie's apartment in Manhattan, apologizing for his bad behavior. He tells her that he plans on leaving Brooklyn and coming to Manhattan to escape from his family and friends, and what he considers to be a fake life. Having realized that Bobby C.'s death means that he is one friend down, he also tells Stephanie that he wants to try to salvage their relationship by being friends. Recognizing Tony's honest wish to change, Stephanie takes his hand in hers, and then him into her arms in the final, struck-pose scene.