Discomania

By Frank Rich

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER Directed by John Badham Screenplay by Norman Wexler

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.

Yet the movie is hard to dismiss, for its prefab ingredients are often stirred to a boil. Energetically directed and well acted (largely by unknowns), Saturday Night Fever succeeds in capturing the animal drive of disco music and the social rituals of the people who dance to its beat. Were it not for some failures of dramatic nerve in the second half, this film might actually have been the rock-'n'-roll Rocky it so desperately aspires to be.

Saturday Night Fever is set in the New 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 there is more to life than first prize in a hustle contest.

As long as Saturday Night Fever stays at the hero's local disco, it is on solid footing. When Tony and his inarticulate chums burn off the tensions of their workaday jobs and Roman Catholic guilts, we see a mindless explosion of pent-up energy that is almost frighteningly hedonistic. The characters become cruel and volatile beneath the strobe lights, and it seems that Saturday Night Fever has an authentic statement to make about America's newest crop of alienated youth.

Unfortunately, the statement proves to be a dangling phrase. In the mechanical effort to push Tony toward a catharsis, Wexler loads the script with a series of stagy and unconvincing plot incidents: a suicide, a gang rumble, a gang bang. By the time Tony takes a soul-searching all-night subway ride to arrive at the story's bogus happy ending, the movie has thrown away its subject to lull us with sentimental bromides about Finding Oneself. We might as well be at Roseland.

The 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

The walls are a nondescript orange and brown, the carpet is forgettable green, and the Spanish style furniture looks as if it had been borrowed from a Holiday Inn. A psychiatrist would have a hard start, in short, if he tried to analyze John Travolta from the way he has decorated his West Hollywood apartment.

Except, of course, for the dozens of model planes piled on top of a pinball machine in an unused bedroom. Built by a friend, the planes are mostly the vintage airliners Travolta saw from his window as a kid, dreaming that they would some day take him away from the humdrum of Englewood, N.J. There are old Lockheed Constellations, with their twin tails, and British Brittanias. But most of all there are sturdy little DC-3s, the workhorse of four decades. "It was the first true airliner," he says. "It depended just on people who wanted to pick up and go someplace."

Someone, in other words, like John Travolta, whose own career is more like a Saturn rocket than anything on his pinball machine. As TV's Vinnie Barbarino, the dedicated underachiever of ABC's Welcome Back, Kotter, he probably draws more soulful sighs from the teenybopper set than any other star in the country. He had an important part in Brian De Palma's Carrie, and he is the star of next spring's movie version of Grease.

Saturday Night Fever is an ideal showcase for Travolta's talents. He swaggers like Mussolini on his platform shoes, struts like Schwarzenegger in his black bikini briefs, and dances like Greco in his white suit. Most of all Travolta shows that he can act. Mr. Kotter's No. 1 sweathog gives a performance of such intensity that he may just grab an Academy Award nomination.

Far from being the loudmouth he plays in Kotter, Travolta has plotted his career with the calculating precision of a corporate accountant. He refuses to accept any more Barbarino parts because they would mean a "horizontal" rather than a vertical movement. He has also stopped doing lucrative promotional tours as Vinnie. "It's so easy to keep your integrity if you put your mind to it," he says. "It's as simple as saying no." It is especially simple, he might have added, if your income is, like his, half a million a year.

Success has come easily to Travolta: since he was 16, he has never been turned down for a part. He dropped out of his Englewood high school--a harsher, drug-ridden version of the happy school in Kotter after his second year, and soon landed summer stock roles, a part in an off-Broadway revival of Rain and the first of his 40 TV commercials. The role of Barbarino was a natural for him--"I knew that character from high school," he says--and soon after Roller's Dremiere in 1975 he was receiving 5,000 fan letters a week. "Before Kotter," says Lois Zetter, who works on his music deals, 'John was merely lovable, someone you wanted to hug. After Kotter he suddenly became gorgeous and sexy."

Is he also happy? Yes and no. He finds that adulation is a kind of prison, his young fans' love not far removed from hostility. When he was shooting Saturday Night in Brooklyn, the teen-agers would try to coax him out of his trailer as they might a caged dog--by rocking it back and forth.

More disturbing than the fans was the death of Diana Hyland, who played the mother on ABC'S Eight Is Enough. Though 18 years older than Travolta, she was, he says, the only woman he really loved. Her death from cancer last March was probably the only tragedy he has known. After she died, he says, "I was in shock most of the time. I'm still finding it difficult to adjust to the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to me."

Work is Travolta's main pleasure these days. His only real hobby, flying, is prohibited by his contract with Producer Robert Stigwood, and his DC-3--the full-size duplicate of all those models--lies idle in a hangar. He has few close friends and distrusts most people he did not know before he became famous. Even on bright, Chamber of Commerce days he keeps most of the light out of his apartment, poring over scripts or occasionally strumming on a guitar.

His early start left him without a true adolescence, and emotionally Travolta is an odd combination, half boy, half man --a middle-aged man at that. The man plans his career. The boy buys a DC-3 and collects model airplanes. "Both flying and acting meant being out of the crowd to me," he says. "When I was a kid in bed late at night, I'd hear the drone of a plane coming out of LaGuardia. That sound was very romantic to me. I'd wish my bed were in the plane and I could look out my window and see the stars."

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