I’ve hated “Saturday Night Fever” since the first time I saw it in 1977. It’s the only Hollywood movie that offends me as an Italian-American. Sure, it’s “iconic” — but that debased term is now used for every pizza joint that closed because of a rent hike.
I admit that I love the pulse-pounding opening sequence where John Travolta prances under the 86th Street tracks in Bensonhurst to the beat of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” Who doesn’t? But the next 116 minutes make my blood boil.
Movies about Mafia gangsters, which some Italian-Americans grumble about, rarely bother me. The Mafia was and is a real thing. Some Mafia movies are cinematic masterpieces.
But the Bay Ridge disco world depicted in “Saturday Night Fever,” which celebrates its 40th anniversary this month, is entirely fake. It was based on a New York Magazine story called “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night” by Nik Cohn, a British pop-music journo who knew nothing about New York and would later plead guilty to heroin trafficking. Cohn admitted in 1996 that he made up the whole tale.
What’s wrong with that? After all, there really was a place called 2001 Disco Odyssey in Bay Ridge, where the characters of the film danced every Saturday night. And aren’t all movies fiction on some level?
“Saturday Night Fever” depicted a contrived dark side to the spirits-lifting 1970s dance craze, which included ballet greats Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov at Lincoln Center, the groundbreaking choreography of “A Chorus Line” and the celebrity dazzle of Studio 54. All brought fresh glamour to town, as well as the notion that moving one’s body to music could be empowering.
“Saturday Night Fever” defined a nonexistent, miserable dance world and used Italian-American characters to make it seem real. In the film’s telling, the disco frenzy in a Brooklyn neighborhood far from Manhattan reflected a despairing refuge from going-nowhere, blue-collar lives. Make that low-lives — a bunch of uneducated, racist, violence-loving, working-class lugs epitomized by John Travolta’s paint store clerk Tony Manero.
Travolta’s actual Italian ancestry, and his supercharged performance that gave Tony more nuance than he deserved, helped disarm any Italian-American qualms over his character or the story. But “Saturday Night Fever” depicts a “guido” world without any redeeming qualities.
Tony’s “love” interests, Karen Lynn Gorney and Donna Pescow, speak in “guidette” accents that are stereotypically cringe-worthy
In the rough, working-class, mostly Italian Brooklyn neighborhood of my childhood — Ocean Hill, where residents had even less money than those in Bay Ridge or Bensonhurst — my family, friends and neighbors didn’t have much but they were intelligent and loving. They were respectful of women despite using sometimes vulgar language.
The characters of “Saturday Night Fever,” on the other hand, are so uniformly stupid. How stupid? One guy asks Tony’s brother, an ex-priest, if he could get the pope to give him a dispensation for getting his girlfriend an abortion.
Tony’s “love” interests, Karen Lynn Gorney and Donna Pescow, speak in “guidette” accents that are stereotypically cringe-worthy — even if you disregard the terrible dialogue. When Travolta learns that Gorney had a fling with an older music producer in Manhattan, she explains the guy’s appeal this way: “I didn’t know how to do stuff, so I’d ask him and he’d tell me.” This from a character whom Travolta regards as classier than himself.
Tony’s view of women is revealed in comments like, “You gotta decide whether you’re gonna be a nice girl or a c--t.” And, “You a–holes almost broke my p—y finger.”
Another “classic” Tony line embraces a unified theory of sexual and race relations: “Would you put your d–k in a spic? Does it get bigger in a n—-r?”
If you don’t remember those lines — or the hideous gang-rape of Pescow’s character Annette by three of Tony’s pals in the back seat of a car — you likely saw the bowdlerized version released a few years later. No fewer than 100 changes turned the original R rating to PG — a version still widely in circulation today.
“Saturday Night Fever” was skillfully marketed by Paramount Pictures as a feel-good, party-time film. The campaign drew on the “Welcome Back Kotter” popularity of sexy, charismatic Travolta. The Bee Gees’ soundtrack was familiar to Americans weeks before the premiere.
Those factors cosmeticized a wretched portrayal of the ethnic group it’s still permissible to ridicule and denigrate — Italian-Americans. Forty years later, it’s time to burn this fever out of our brains.
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