Minneapolis Saturday Night Fever (1977)

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Genre: Drama
Release Date: 12/19/1977
Running Time: 120 mins
Director: John Badham
Cast: John Travolta, Karen Lynn Gorney, Barry Miller, Joseph Cali, Paul Pape
Producer: Milt Felsen, Robert Stigwood
Writer: Nik Cohn, Norman Wexler
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
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Movie Title, Weekly Earnings, Total Earnings

Saturday Night Fever (1977)

Well, you can tell by the way he walks that walk, he's a woman's man--no time to talk. The he, of course, is Tony Manero (John Travolta), and if you remember the rest of the song, he's been kicked around since he was born. In other words, Tony is another oppressed "mean teen" in a long lineage that stretches from James Dean's rebel without a cause to the ghastly Telly in Kids. Speaking of which, the purportedly radical Kids owes a good deal to Saturday Night Fever's still-gritty depiction of white New York boys knocking back beers and screwing girls over; and in light of the eternal ‘70s revival, one could even argue that Saturday Night Fever (1977) works less as cutting-edge kitsch than as portrait of the way we live now. The difference, though, comes via the movie's happy ending, in which Tony's hard-won class ascension (complete with sun rising over the Brooklyn Bridge) foreshadows the chilly new morning on the horizon. Along with Star Wars, this quasi-musical ode to upward mobility represented the revenge of white youth culture after Vietnam, Watergate, blaxploitation, and all those downbeat Hollywood art movies had run their course. Stayin' alive, indeed. (Rob Nelson) — Rob Nelson