Word: travoltas
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From a cynical perspective Saturday Night Fever looks not so much like a movie as a merchandising assault on the youth market. The first film to exploit the latest disco craze, it stars a hot TV personality, John Travolta, and features a sound track overcrowded with highly pluggable Bee Gees songs. The sets are plastered with posters of Al Pacino and Farrah Fawcett-Majors; the script shamelessly ransacks American Graffiti and Rocky. The people behind Saturday Night Fever -or perhaps one should say the accountants-have not left much to chance...
...York equivalent of Rocky's South Philadelphia-Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, an Italian-American enclave where working-class kids slave all week so that they can dress up and boogie on Saturday nights. Norman Wexler's screenplay focuses on the best dancer in the community, Tony Manero (Travolta), a paint-store salesman who still lives with his smothering family. Tony is ignorant of the world, narcissistic and, except on the dance floor, aimless. The film's story is about his tumultuous romance with another good dancer (Karen Lynn Gorney), a socially ambitious Manhattan secretary who teaches him that...
...performances, at least, are first-rate and John Travolta is a revelation. At once mean-looking and pretty, he conveys the kind of threatening sexuality that floors an audience. His dancing is electric, his comic timing acute. In the timeless manner of movie sex symbols, his carnal presence can make even a safe Hollywood package seem like dangerous goods. - Frank Rich
...urge to perform runs in the Travolta family. John's mother, Helen Burke, an actress in Englewood, N.J., urged all her six children to take part in local theater. As the baby of the family, John had many acts to follow. At age seven, he flew around the country with his sister Ellen in a road show of Gypsy and at twelve acted in his first amateur production. Recalls Travolta: "That world of airplanes and theaters seemed my only route to freedom." At 16, he quit school and began working in dinner theaters and summer stock. Looking back...
Public Maulings. The days of free-and-easy anonymity are over for Travolta. On his Bus Stop tour he lives like a recluse in his dressing room. The last time he tried to take a date to a disco, the place was overrun. "I don't think any girl could take my schedule now," he says, quite accurately, and claims to have no steady girl friend. He was mobbed by 5,000 fans at a Cleveland record store recently. At the world's largest indoor shopping mall at Schaumburg, Ill., outside Chicago, an estimated 30,000 engulfed...