It is of course the film that launched the popularity of the disco movement into the mainstream. With an iconic soundtrack supplied by none other than the Bee Gees themselves, it's a coming of age tale in which starry-eyed Tony Manero (Travolta) is exposed to more of the real world than he would ever want to see, confronts his prejudices and has to grow up. Plus of course all the dancing. There's a lot of dancing.
Though I was alive in the 1970s I was in no position to remember it, so I am happy to stand corrected as to the accuracy of the fashions and societal norms of the time. If Saturday Night Fever does tell it as it was, then the world has changed a lot in the intervening 40 years. New York was grittier. Brooklyn was full of racists and husbands assaulting their wives. Men were rapists, and the women who went with them trod a fine line between getting noticed and getting noticed too much. The world was a dead-end place. Saturday Night Fever is sometimes tough to watch for these reasons. What was harmless & playful banter back then is a sexual assault in 2021.
Of course the Overton Window shifts through the years and with enough time something will always look dated. For this I can't fault Saturday Night Fever. Where the production team did drop the ball though is in a fundamental misunderstanding of the structure of their story. The events of the film happen in roughly the following order - 1) Moreno is young and carefree 2) Morena falls for lady dancer Stephanie 3) a series of bad things happen 4) Moreno wins a rigged dance-off, causing him to question everything 5) reconciliation with Stephanie 6) the future is an unwritten story. What the film needed was for #4 to be at the end. After the reconciliation with Stephanie, they should then compete in the dance, and end on a big dance number. They don't need to win the competition, they just need the final shot to be Moreno triumphantly living his dream on the neon-lit floor. This isn't rocket science, Bollywood has been doing this for decades!
With the structure as it is, Moreno's final promise to Stephanie to grow up implicitly comes with a promise to give up dancing. The understanding is that disco is a childish fascination holding Moreno back. Only by giving up the thing that gives him a boyish glint in his eye can he grow and become a real man. How depressing. Much better would be to put the bad events earlier in the film, give Moreno a chance to stew in his nadir before the reconciliation with Stephanie in her Manhattan apartment and then send them both back to Brooklyn for the triumphant finale. This is a film that's supposed to be celebrating disco; why can't we grow up and have a boogie?
Where the film is timeless is in Travolta's performance. It doesn't matter how many years pass or societal norms change, that man can move. From the opening strut (Stayin' Alive) to his solo performance (You Should Be Dancing) to the final dance off (More Than A Woman) - Travolta has it all. I recommend Saturday Night Fever. Travolta's performance is one for the ages, and in spite of a huge structural flaw in the story, the film's faults are easily covered for be the sheer joy in watching a man in a white suit single-handedly define a genre.
