John Badham
La Febbre Del Sabato Sera (1977)

If they had told me back then, in 1978, that one day going to a disco would be legally prohibited to contain the contagion of the COVID-19 pandemic, I would have thought of a so-called dystopian science fiction scenario. But it was my fate to escape long enough to witness even this (being in good health and now fully vaccinated). Life can also be mocking and, given the current situation, out of curiosity I recently asked a dear friend who owns a DVD copy of the film "Saturday Night Fever" if he would kindly lend it to me just to get an idea.

I must preface this by saying that, when the film was released in Italy in March 1978, I hesitated about the possibility of going to the cinema to see John Badham's movie. This hesitation, unusual for a cinephile as I already was then, was explained by what I was told by a friend who, just to understand the reasons for the film's success, had gone to see the incriminated work and not only found it a modest movie, but was puzzled by the hysteria scenes from the female audience. "Not unless it was a concert of the resurrected Beatles!" were his very words, perhaps exaggerated but believable since the so-called "Travoltismo" fashion was gaining momentum, with a tendency to thank the good Lord for reaching every Friday and thus dedicating the weekend to the much-desired dances in the disco.

Personally, I was bewildered because I had understood and justified the anger of young English punks towards the musical establishment and the surrounding world manifested in 1977 and, in the face of this novelty coming from the States, I wondered: "What the hell is this new musical cinematic proposal?" And as if that weren't enough, the film's soundtrack consisted mainly of songs by the Bee Gees, such an insipid pop group with those falsetto voices from castrated homosexed to make me rethink who were the worst musicians around (at the time I thought the title was a tie between the Cugini di Campagna and the Nuovi Angeli, but the worst knows no bounds and it came from abroad..). With these doubts, I chose not to watch "Saturday Night Fever," to snub it.

Well, after all these decades have passed and certain youthful fervors have dwindled, this curiosity came to me and I wanted to ascertain the nature of the work directly. I assume the plot is known to most and it is just worth recalling that the protagonist is a certain Tony Manero, by profession a clerk in a paint shop in the New York metropolis. An Italian American like many others, played by a young John Travolta who seems well-suited to the role, without having to exert himself too much (and the expression on his face makes me think of a boiled fish, luckily his acting qualities have improved over time as can be noted in "Pulp Fiction" by Tarantino).

Tony Manero's life is truly gray, and the only outlet is his passion for dance, for which he launches into pirouettes and virtuosity during weekend evenings. Inevitably in all this there is also room for romantic affairs with girls, rivalries between youth gangs, brawls with even deadly outcomes until an ending of redemption for Manero, finally enlightened on the futility of certain life attitudes and the need to behave better (otherwise, the chance of starting a serious relationship with the current beauty would fade..).

So a well-known intertwining of troubled love among competing young people (here the reference is to a musical known as "West Side Story" from 1961) which adds nothing to the theme of gray everyday life in a modern metropolis like New York. Incredible but true, one might say that characters like Tony Manero feel better than they are as soon as they step onto a dance floor. I've always thought (and I still think) that, in the face of a poor living condition, escapism for its own sake would resolve nothing. Coming home one wouldn't feel any better. But trying to live in a reality for its own sake (as in the disco environment) became, at the end of the '70s, a widely followed outlet. And "Saturday Night Fever" was the evident demonstration because an not at all special film (unless you consider John Travolta such a good dancer to be at the level of a Fred Astaire) effectively implanted a significant cultural phenomenon. Released in the States in December 1977, it reached Italy in March 1978 when the long season of tension led to the Moro Affair. In such a leaden atmosphere, the message conveyed by the film on the notes of the refrain "You should be dancing yeah!" (damn Bee Gees..) served as a great incentive to retreat into the private. Thus began the season of reflux, seeing the tension of political ideals (something similar to what was meanwhile experienced in the States, with the disillusionment following the end of the Vietnam War so previously opposed especially by the young Yankees..). In this implicit invitation to launch into disco dancing, there was thus a desire for many to put behind an era of commitment (and thus prevailed a certain resignation towards long-standing complex social issues).

Therefore, watching the film today is just a proper review of the fashion history in the last quarter of the twentieth century. So many of us went from being young and committed to young and disillusioned. An actor like John Travolta encountered great public success (especially female) and shortly thereafter, by heterogenesis of ends, in 1979 on the streets of New York quite a number of people displayed banners with the following slogan: "Disco sucks!" (or the beginning of the rejection of a bizarre musical trend to make way for new new wave-branded trends). Sic transit gloria mundi...