AA.VV.

Would ya just watch the hair? Ya know, I work on my hair a long time and you hit it. He hits my hair

Saturday night at the Manero house: the family sits down to eat and starts arguing, the mother is on edge and loses it, the unemployed father raises his hands, the little sister screeches, slaps and pork chops go flying. Young Tony has spent hours doing his hair and flexing his muscles in front of a Bruce Lee poster, and now he's eating spaghetti wrapped in a sheet so as not to stain his pulling shirt, but his father smacks him flat on the back of the neck. A simple little scene, good for telling the story of an impetuous but uncertain youth, torn between difficult generational relationships and an American dream betrayed by a failing economy and a racial segregation that leaves Italians, Puerto Ricans and Black people alike behind. In the background, working-class Brooklyn in the Seventies: a lively, noisy neighborhood, but also rough and narrow-minded, where getting ahead only works through the violence of street gangs.

There's only one escape: the 2001 Odyssey, the disco that every weekend promises its patrons a getaway from reality. On the fluorescent tiled floor, slicked-back dancers glide along to the latest flashy 4/4 trend called disco music. The undisputed prince of the floor, as smooth as a dolphin in water with spring-loaded fins: Tony Manero.

When director John Badham starts working on "Saturday Night Fever" with the idea of creating a dance drama, the only available source material is an article in New York Magazine written by music critic Nik Cohn and titled "Tribal Rites Of The New Saturday Night," a semi-fictional account of young city nightlife. The story is simple, the budget is limited, and the actors are almost all unknown to the general public, which incidentally makes the film feel more realistic.

The cast does, however, include John Travolta, an uninhibited twenty-three-year-old who, with a single walk over the opening credits, has already captured the entire essence of young men of the era. His character is a good worker and, all things considered, a devoted son, but the restlessness unsettling his face is visible in every scene; he has an innate talent for dancing, but otherwise his life is dull and he doesn't know which way to turn, escaping it by spending his weekly paycheck on trinkets of false emancipation.

His neighborhood friends, Joey, Gus, Double J and Bobby C, are losers just like him; at night, after the disco, they go hang around on the Verrazzano Bridge connecting Brooklyn to Staten Island, here meant as a symbol of hope for a better future. Yes, because between masculinity in crisis, brawls between rival gangs, raw animal sex consumed in the back seat of a car parked under streetlights, and women treated badly, "Saturday Night Fever" captures an ugly, uncomfortable society, where dramas and excesses are laid out in black and white without any gentleness.

The birth of disco fever

To make the film flow better and feel more compelling, those behind it have to pay close attention to the key ingredient: the music, the glue capable of underscoring both the saddest death and the sensuality of the body and the stardust of nights out at the disco. And this is where "Saturday Night Fever" stops being just a classic coming-of-age film and turns into a massive cultural phenomenon whose imagery endures to this day. Released with perfect timing in December 1977 on a budget of three and a half million dollars, the film soon grosses nearly three hundred million, while the accompanying soundtrack sells around forty million copies worldwide, sitting atop the charts for months on end.

The funny thing is that a large part of the film is initially shot using already-released tracks, selected by producer Robert Stigwood and music director David Shire. The goal is simple: capitalize on the new dance craze of the moment. Sure, "new" is relative here; an early idea of disco music had already emerged in the form of "cinematic soul" at the start of the Seventies, courtesy of people like Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, Eddie Kendricks, Stevie Wonder and the early Jackson 5. In gay discos all across America, the genre breathes like a second skin. Then, in November 1975, a new spark: "Love To Love You Baby" by Donna Summer, a track perhaps still a touch too slow for the canon, but able to bottle up the genre's most sinful essence and sell it back to the mainstream.

From this point on, disco quickly becomes pervasive and surprisingly versatile merchandise, partly thanks to the success of "Saturday Night Fever" itself. Just take the scene of Tony and his friends walking into the Odyssey to the beat of "A Fifth Of Beethoven", Walter Murphy's rhythmic reworking of the famous Fifth Symphony, as proof that the four-to-the-floor beat at 120 bpm is a formula flexible enough to fit almost anything. In that same vein, Shire crafts the swaying swing of "Manhattan Skyline" and the Cuban salsa of "Salsation" — the latter used to introduce the film's female lead, Stephanie Mangano, played by a superb Karen Lynn Gorney.

Other previously released tracks include "Boogie Shoes" by KC & The Sunshine Band, the delightfully over-the-top orchestral fantasy of "Open Sesame" by Kool & The Gang, and the driving, ten-plus-minute epic of the famous "Disco Inferno" by the Trammps, the latter still an enduring classic to this day. The genre's big-band spirit, meanwhile, is captured through the inclusion of MFSB (short for Mother Father Sister Brother), a thirty-plus-piece orchestra that reworks an old Nite-Liters track called "K-Jee". This is one of the film's key moments: during the dance contest for the $500 prize, the visiting Puerto Rican couple deliver a routine unmistakably superior to the competition, set to this very song. Yet the Odyssey's managers award the prize to Tony and Stephanie instead, simply because they're Italian-American regulars; in a gesture of anger, pride and shame, Tony refuses the prize and hands it over to the couple who truly earned it, sparking Stephanie's fury and setting off the argument that drives the film toward its conclusion.

The fortuitous golden touch

But to complete the work, something new is needed — something tailor-made to underline the film's fizzy energy with a contemporary touch. The answer is found in three brothers from the Isle of Man, transplanted to Australia, named Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb. Brought in at the last minute to fill in the gaps and provide a few songs to be added in post-production, the Bee Gees are sent to France, to the Château d'Hérouville, the famous studio housed in an eighteenth-century castle already used by David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Uriah Heep — and where Elton John recorded a little album called "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road". In the space of just a couple of days, the Gibb brothers knock out a handful of the most recognizable hits of the twentieth century. What was meant to be mere post-production ends up becoming the soundtrack of "Saturday Night Fever"'s defining, signature moment. The track record is staggering.

"Stayin' Alive", the iconic opening titles over which Tony struts down the street with a testosterone-fuelled swagger, before we see him chasing skirts like a stray dog and voraciously wolfing down two slices of takeaway pizza — the song was originally meant to be called "Saturday Night", but to avoid the blandness of repeating the film's title, it was changed to "Stayin' Alive", inadvertently providing a commentary that underscores the film's steel-veined spirit even more effectively.

"More Than A Woman", performed by Tavares, is the ode that accompanies Tony and Stephanie's dance rehearsals, a rollercoaster of butterflies in the stomach paying tribute to the brief but intense purity of blissful youth. For the couples' contest scene, the song instead appears in its original version sung by the Bee Gees themselves, their famous falsetto laying down a soft, cotton-wool cushion that makes the moment feel especially intimate, despite being set in a crowded nightclub.

"Night Fever" recurs throughout various parts of the film, but most notably in the group dance scene, a "viral" moment that captures the public's fascination with disco and which, by the end of 1979, had helped drive the opening of more than thirty thousand discotheques across America.

"You Should Be Dancing" accompanies the scene that earned Travolta an Oscar nomination; having refused the use of a stunt double, the actor spent months training for the role (losing a great deal of weight in the process), but the way he grins while spinning across the dance floor in front of his own community is perhaps the most genuine expression of joy and determination, laced with a healthy dose of youthful showing-off to the sound of congas and rhythm guitar.

"If I Can't Have You", in the version sung by Yvonne Elliman, who had already appeared in the original cast of "Jesus Christ Superstar", underscores several moments of the film with romantic restraint, that bulletproof, declamatory chorus oozing adolescent longing with every note.

The tracklist also includes "Jive Talkin'", already a US number one in 1975 off the back of the album "Main Course", although the scene it was meant for was cut from the film.

Toward a dramatic final climax

The other famous piece of classical music reworked in disco style is again courtesy of Shire, with "Night On Disco Mountain"; Modest Mussorgsky's menacing orchestral surge of buzzing strings, flutes and timpani underscores the reckless idiocy of a group of drunk boys leaping across the cables of the Verrazzano Bridge, suspended more than a hundred metres above the strait's currents. The choice of Mussorgsky's tumultuous piece is no accident, since the film's most dramatic moment unfolds on that very same bridge, during one dizzying Saturday night.

First it's Annette's turn, the neighbourhood girl plagued by low self-esteem who waits in vain for Tony's attention; tired of always playing second fiddle, Annette decides to treat herself to a night of drinking and freedom, but instead finds herself raped in the back seat of a car by Joey and Double J, while Tony looks on indifferently — indeed, between the lines, he even blames her for putting herself in that situation, in one of the most uncomfortable and hardest-to-stomach scenes in the entire film.

But Annette's fate is quickly overshadowed by that of Bobby C, the youngest and shyest of the group. Bobby's anguish runs through the whole film: he's spiralled into paranoia after getting his girlfriend pregnant and doesn't know what to do; the Italian-American community is deeply Catholic, but Bobby wonders whether the Pope might grant an abortion in special cases — does anyone know? More than anything, Bobby needs to talk, but Tony ignores him; nobody cares about the feelings of a young man in 1970s Brooklyn. In a fit of desperation, Bobby finally finds the courage to climb onto the bridge's cables along with his friends, but it's clear his is really just one last cry for attention; blinded by tears and overwhelmed by the disappointment of a life with no way out, Bobby plunges to his death.

And here come the Bee Gees' subtle filigrees once more, slipping in the shimmering ballad "How Deep Is Your Love" in the closing scene that reconciles Tony and Stephanie and opens up the possibility of a move to Manhattan — finally, after years of uncertainty, that damned bridge may at last be crossed for good.

The film ends this way, raw and somewhat unresolved, probably crude in the eyes of new generations for whom casual hints of racism, sexism and homophobia immediately stand out, yet it still tells, without any filter, what the Seventies were like in a roaring New York.

Strip away the iconic disco spins in flared trousers and silk shirts, and "Saturday Night Fever" is anything but a comedy. Its rugged, virile and violent charm still makes for a sadly contemporary watch today. As for the rest, the music takes care of it.

Ride the wave of great music

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13/11/2022