Saturday Night Fever

Saturday Night Fever (1977) follows Tony Manero, who works in a paint shop in Brooklyn. His weekdays are dull and going nowhere; on Saturday night he is king of the disco. It is remembered for the dancing, but it is actually a dark film about class, entrapment and escape. The source was a 1976 article in New York magazine, Nik Cohn's Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night about the Brooklyn disco scene. Cohn admitted years later that he made it up; newly arrived from England, he had no knowledge of that world and built Tony Manero out of a mod he had known in London. A story filmed as fact was fiction. John Travolta became a star with it and was nominated for Best Actor. The music is largely by the Bee Gees, and the soundtrack was among the best selling of its era; the spread of disco worldwide is tied closely to that album. The film was rated R. A version cut for younger audiences was released the following year with a PG rating. It runs 118 minutes. Good for: seventies American cinema, dance, and the music of the period. Less good for: anyone expecting disco fun will be misled; the film contains sexual violence and the characters' language is racist and misogynist. The behaviour of the young men around Tony is not endorsed, but it is shown at length.