Remembering the Saturday Night Fever We Forget

It seems that Lenny's Pizza in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, is closing down.

I have to admit that I didn't even know about any Lenny's Pizza until the news story about its closure, occasioned principally by its appearance in Saturday Night Fever. Still, all the talk about the film did remind me of how the film struck me when I first saw it, long after its initial release.

I remember being surprised, very surprised, by just how bleak the movie was. The innumerable evocations of the film I'd seen in other films (like Airplane!, or Short Circuit), all emphasized the disco stuff. But the movie was not just about Saturday Night. It was also about "Sunday morning," and all the other mornings, noons and nights of the rest of the week as experienced by a bunch of working-class kids leading dead-end lives in an America that, as we see even more clearly with the hindsight of a half century, was facing diminished prospects after the end of a post-war boom that proved singular event rather than "new normal"--and the unexpected urban grit made more of an impression on me than anything else in the film.

Indeed, the fact that a movie like this was made as a big feature, and became a big blockbuster, struck me as itself indicative of its having come from a different time, and the bit of film history I have learned since has only affirmed that. In 1977 "high concept" film was already a-borning (Jaws came out two years later, while Star Wars had made its debut six months earlier), but this was still the era of the "New Hollywood."

By contrast it was very different with that obvious counterpoint, the following year's screen adaptation of the hit stage musical Grease, where John Travolta played a very similar figure to the one he played in Saturday Night Fever (Danny Zucco, of similar social background and not much more intelligence) in a far more cheerful tale. The grit scrubbed out of the picture it was a bright, upbeat, nostalgic story where the things that went wrong for the characters in Fever went right for them here. (Unlike Fever's Bobby C., it turns out that Kenickie did not get his girlfriend pregnant after all, but even if she was, he was ready to "make an honest woman" out of her, instead of performing suicidal stunts on a bridge and falling to his death.)

I suppose Hollywood was still able to take a hard look at the less pleasant facts of contemporary life--but increasingly inclining to make a principal product of looking at the past with rose-colored glasses, the New Hollywood starting to give way to "the New Old Hollywood" increasingly dominant since. Now anything like the working-class drama of Fever is apt to be the stuff of little indie movies almost no one will see, or feel-bad prestige TV that a certain kind of cowardly ideologue will sneer at as "poverty porn"--while we are barraged with commercials for the upcoming HBO Max prequel to Grease, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies.