Dirty Dancing

Emile Ardolino’s 1987 film drops Frances Houseman into a Catskills resort in 1963 and hands her to Johnny Castle, the staff dance instructor. The class map is drawn in the opening stretch, when the owner tells his waiters to romance the guests’ daughters and orders the entertainment staff to keep their hands off, so the romance is a rule violation from the first reel. Nor is the dancing the engine. Penny’s illegal abortion forces Baby to borrow money from her father without saying why, then to take Penny’s place onstage at a rival hotel, and the lift everyone remembers exists only because the film carries that subplot. Clearasil wanted in to reach teenagers, then asked for the abortion thread to be cut. Eleanor Bergstein refused and the tie-in collapsed; she has said a political theme must be written into the story, or one day you are told to remove it. Shooting ran through autumn in Virginia and North Carolina, brown leaves sprayed green, the crew in coats while the leads went into the lake in jeans. A good fit if you want that final lift to land as the consequence of what happened to Penny. Not for anyone after summer warmth: the leaves had to be painted and the plot runs on money and class.