With the arrival of Saturday Night Fever (1977) to Netflix Instant, I thought I'd reach back to an article I wrote a few years ago for Popshifter.com's 1970's-themed issue, "Dancing Ourselves Into the Tomb." It's more of a personal take on the film's soundtrack than an outright movie review, but my thoughts on the film do come across, so consider this a slight change of pace.
Can't Fight the Fever
(Published December 5, 2011, in slightly different form)
When the movie
Saturday Night Fever was released in December
of 1977, it became a smash critical and popular success that
delivered disco to the masses, John Travolta to movie theaters, and a
record that became the biggest-selling soundtrack of all time.
But in my
household, the film’s influence was exactly...nil. Considering my
family’s strict rock & roll diet and my impressionable age, I didn’t have to be
told that a movie about disco was
cinema non grata. (Say it with me
now: “Disco sucks!") But beyond hewing to the party line, as a family we agreed those high-pitched, nasal Bee Gee voices had become annoyingly ubiquitous in the months following the film's release.
 |
| The Bee Gees and their chests |
And those voices—along with the other
Fever songs cramming
the airwaves—were
everywhere. I don't remember how many times that thumping bass and Gibb-brother
whine would suddenly infect the car radio, causing one or the other
Woodstock-era parent to reach violently for the tuner with a stream
of R-rated invective. I knew the rules: if it had a dance beat, it
was shunned—as clear as the laws of physics.
For the next half decade, my views on disco—and by extension,
Saturday Night Fever—remained unchanged, even after the country's
disco rage had subsided. When the movie showed up on cable in
both PG and R-rated versions, I peeked in at a few key scenes to compare the levels of nudity and swearing (the '80s equivalent of watching deleted scenes), but even the charms of Donna Pescow and Karen Lynn Gorney couldn't overcome my lingering aversion to the film as a whole.
