Word: travoltas
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...there, in the walk that John Travolta takes through the opening credits of Saturday Night Fever. Right there is the little kid from New Jersey who danced in front of the television while he watched James Cagney storm-tapping through Yankee Doodle Dandy. The boy in the chorus who trundled his way through a nine-month tour of Grease. The young man who landed a supporting part on a sitcom, watched himself become a TV star, a pretty face on a poster, and a purveyor of slick, sappy top 40 ballads. All that bought him a shot at what...
...John Travolta snagged that too. Just took a stroll down the Brooklyn asphalt, and midblock he had the street tucked neatly under his arm. By the time he got to the corner he had walked away with the turnaway hit of the season, second only to Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1978 grosses. Saturday Night Fever has started Travolta along a yellow-brick show-biz road that reaches out of sight, raised discomania to a national craze and made superstars of a likable rock group called the Bee Gees for the second, or maybe it's the third...
American Hot Wax, sad to say, is not in the class of John Travolta's disco musical. It has more in common with such cheapie rock pictures as Rock, Rock, Rock and Rock Around the Clock, which Freed himself appeared in a generation ago. Like those films, American Hot Wax seems to have been thrown together in a few weeks; it relies on rude energy to overcome its essential slightness. Luckily, the energy is there-in the direction, some of the acting, and especially in the music. Any movie that features Chuck Berry stomping out Roll Over Beethoven...
...costumes, designed by Lindsay Davis '75 and Alison Taylor, were very impressive, glittery and colorful. The dance numbers (in the first act, at least) lacked a certain pizzazz (although the '50s-style "T.V. Love" song-dance combo was a show-stopper, and I'm told that the disco-oriented "Travolta-clone" scene in Act II was equally memorable). And while all of the actors did creditable jobs within the horrible confines of the format, there were a number of unquestionable standouts (at least in Act I): Shipley Munson as the aforementioned squeakyvoiced space-person named Xeno Phobia, Michael Der Manuelian...
...Saturday night, the Harvard cagers were hot. They burned up the nets with their feverish shooting and even John Travolta could not out-hustle the likes of Glenn Fine, Bob Hooft, and Cyrus Booker...