Saturday Night Fever is a 1977 American dance drama film directed by John Badham and produced by Robert Stigwood. It stars John Travolta as Tony Manero, a young Italian-American man from the Brooklyn borough of New York. Manero spends his weekends dancing and drinking at a local discothèque while dealing with social tensions and disillusionment, feeling directionless and trapped in his working-class ethnic neighborhood. The story is based on "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night", a mostly fictional article by music writer Nik Cohn, first published in a June 1976 issue of New York magazine. The film features music by the Bee Gees and many other prominent artists of the disco era.
A major critical and commercial success, Saturday Night Fever had a tremendous effect on popular culture of the late 1970s. The film helped to popularize disco music around the world and made Travolta, already well known from his role in the TV sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, a household name. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance, becoming the fifth-youngest nominee in the category. The film showcases aspects of the music, dancing, and subculture surrounding the disco era, including symphony-orchestrated melodies, haute couture styles of clothing, pre-AIDS sexual promiscuity, and graceful choreography. The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, featuring disco songs by the Bee Gees, is one of the best-selling soundtracks in history. John Travolta reprised his role of Tony Manero in Staying Alive in 1983, which was panned by critics despite being successful at the box office.
In 2010, Saturday Night Fever was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
Plot[]
Tony Manero is a 19-year-old Italian-American from the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. He lives with his parents, grandmother, and younger sister, and works at a dead-end job in a small hardware store. To escape his day-to-day life, Tony goes to 2001 Odyssey, a local discotheque, where he is king of the dance floor and receives the admiration and respect he craves. Tony has four close Italian-American friends from the neighborhood: Joey, Double J, Gus, and Bobby C. A fringe member of his group of friends is Annette, a neighborhood girl who is infatuated with Tony; however, he is not attracted to her.
Tony and his friends ritually stop on the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge to clown around. The bridge has special significance for Tony as a symbol of escape to a better life.
Tony agrees to be Annette's partner in an upcoming dance contest, but her happiness is short-lived when Tony is mesmerized by another woman at the club, Stephanie Mangano, whose dancing skills exceed Annette's. Although Stephanie rejects Tony's advances, she eventually agrees to be his partner in the dance competition, provided that their partnership remains professional.
Frank Jr., Tony's older brother and the pride of the family as a Roman Catholic priest, brings despair to their parents and grandmother when he tells them he has quit the priesthood. Tony shares a warm relationship with Frank Jr., but Tony feels pleased that he is no longer the black sheep of the family. Frank Jr. tells Tony that he never wanted to be a priest and only did it to make their parents happy. He also encourages Tony to do something with his dancing.
While on his way home from the grocery store, Gus is attacked by a gang and hospitalized. He tells Tony and his friends that his attackers were the Barracudas, a Puerto Rican gang. Meanwhile, Bobby C. has been trying to get out of his relationship with his devout Catholic girlfriend, Pauline, who is pregnant with his child. Facing pressure from his family and others to marry her, Bobby asks Frank Jr. if the Pope would grant him dispensation for an abortion. When Frank tells him such a thing would be highly unlikely, Bobby's feelings of desperation increase.
Eventually, the group gets their revenge on the Barracudas and crash Bobby C's car into their hangout. Tony, Double J, and Joey get out of the car to fight, but Bobby C. runs away when a gang member tries to attack him in the car. When the group visits Gus in the hospital, they are angry when he tells them that he may have identified the wrong gang. Later, Tony and Stephanie dance at the competition and end up winning first prize. However, Tony believes that a Puerto Rican couple performed better, and that the judges' decision was racially motivated. He gives the Puerto Rican couple his trophy and award money and leaves with Stephanie. Once inside Bobby's car, Stephanie mocks Tony and tells him she was using him. Tony tries to rape Stephanie, but she resists and runs from him.
Tony's friends come to the car along with an intoxicated Annette. Joey says she has agreed to have sex with everyone. Tony tries to lead her away but is subdued by Double J and Joey and sullenly leaves with the group in the car. Joey has sex with Annette in the back seat of the car. After Joey finishes with Annette, he switches places with Double J who then proceeds to rape Annette despite her loud protests, with Tony clearly uncomfortable with the situation in the front seat. Bobby C. pulls the car over on the Verrazzano–Narrows Bridge for their usual cable-climbing antics. Instead of abstaining as usual, Bobby performs stunts more recklessly than the rest of the gang. Realizing that he is acting recklessly, Tony tries to get him to come down. Bobby's strong sense of despair, the situation with Pauline, and Tony's broken promise to call him earlier that day all lead to a suicidal tirade about Tony's lack of caring, before Bobby slips and falls to his death in the water below.
Disgusted and disillusioned by his friends, his family, and his life, Tony angrily storms off, leaving Double J, Joey, and Annette behind. He spends the rest of the night riding the graffiti-riddled subway into Manhattan. Morning has dawned by the time he appears at Stephanie's apartment. He apologizes for his bad behavior, telling her that he plans to relocate from Brooklyn to Manhattan to try to start a new life. Stephanie forgives Tony, and tells him that she was wrong to say she was using him, and that she danced with him because he gave her respect and moral support. Tony and Stephanie salvage their relationship and agree to be friends.