“Saturday Night Fever,” a glowing Seventies silver-screen interval piece that transcends generations with its pulsating soundtrack, dramatic disco dance scenes and timeless teenage coming-of-age story, made its world premiere on today in historical past, Dec. 14, 1977.
The film debuted at Mann’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles earlier than having fun with nationwide distribution two days later.
“Well-cast, well-acted and well-directed, ‘Saturday Night Fever’ earned positive reviews from many critics, including the late Gene Siskel, who called it his favorite film ever,” writes History.com.
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“But whatever its other cinematic merits, even the film’s strongest proponents would agree that it was the pulsing disco soundtrack of ‘Saturday Night Fever’ that made it a work of lasting historical significance.”
The film opens with one of many nice “a star is born” moments in Hollywood historical past.

The film “Saturday Night Fever,” directed by John Badham. Seen right here, John Travolta as Tony Manero on the dance ground of 2001 Odyssey discotheque. Screen seize, Paramount Pictures. (CBS by way of Getty Images)
John Travolta, lean, good-looking and simply 23 years previous, with an impressive feathery pompadour, performs nightclub king Tony Manero.
He struts gloriously down the streets of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, carrying an open-collar pink shirt, black slacks and a black leather-based jacket, to the sway of the soundtrack title tune “Stayin’ Alive,” because the opening credit roll.
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“Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk/I’m a woman’s man no time to talk,” the Bee Gees sing because the heels of Manero’s footwear click on on the asphalt and his arms swing to the beat.
“One minute into ‘Saturday Night Fever’ you know this picture is onto something, that it knows what it’s talking about,” Siskel, the celebrated film critic, raved of the manufacturing.
The film opens with one of many nice “a star is born” moments in Hollywood historical past.
“Travolta on the dance floor is like a peacock on amphetamines. He struts like crazy.”
Travolta was a goofy sitcom star at that time, recognized for his position as dim-wit Vinnie Barbarino within the tv hit “Welcome Back, Kotter.”

View of the quilt of the soundtrack album from the movie “Saturday Night Fever,” 1977. Published by RSO Records, the album options a big, framed portrait of Australian pop group the Bee Gees as they overlook a photograph of American actor John Travolta as he strikes a pose on a disco dance ground. (Blank Archives/Getty Images)
“Saturday Night Fever” made him a world superstar.
Manero was an uncultured, black-sheep son of a struggling working-class Italian-American household who ascended to the Aristocracy on the dance ground of 2001 Odyssey, an actual Bay Ridge nightclub.
The infectious soundtrack featured a string of radio hits from KC and the Sunshine Band (“Boogie Shoes”), Broadway star-turned-disco diva Yvonne Elliman (“If I Can’t Have You”) and landmark interval hit-maker The Trammps (“Disco Inferno”).
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The album was carried by a string of basic dance-club tunes by Australian act the Bee Gees together with, along with the title observe, “Night Fever,” “Jive Talkin’” and “How Deep is Your Love,” amongst others.
The “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack stays one of many top-selling albums of all time, with greater than 40 million models bought, in line with Billboard.

Gabe Kaplan (proper) performed Gabe Kotter, the trainer of a category of delinquents referred to as the Sweathogs at his former highschool; Vinnie Barbarino (John Travolta) was his scholar. (ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content by way of Getty Images)
“Saturday Night Fever,” the film, was the primary in a trio of Hollywood hits, buoyed by dancing and best-selling soundtracks, that made Travolta one of many greatest stars of the period.
It was adopted in speedy succession by his roles as highschool dangerous boy Danny Zuko in “Grease” (1978) and Houston roughneck Bud Davis in “Urban Cowboy” (1980).
“Saturday Night Fever,” it seems, was a pop-culture sensation that by no means ought to have been.
The film was based mostly on an article by British reporter Nik Cohn, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” that appeared in New York Magazine.
“One minute into ‘Saturday Night Fever’ you know this picture is onto something.” — Gene Siskel
“Vincent was the very best dancer in Bay Ridge,” Cohn wrote on June 7, 1976.
“Everybody knew him. When Saturday night came ’round and he walked into 2001 Odyssey, all the other faces automatically fell back before him, cleared a space for him to float in, right at the very center of the dance floor.”

John Travolta, Travolta’s mom, and producer Robert Stigwood (far left) at a premiere after-party for “Saturday Night Fever” in December 1977. In beard is British rock journalist Nik Cohn. The hit film is predicated on what proved years later to be a fabricated journal article by Cohn. (Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection by way of Getty Images)
The scene was recreated, virtually all the way down to the dance strikes, within the film, with “Vincent” changed by Travolta’s Manero.
The Brit later admitted he fabricated your entire story after witnessing a battle exterior the nightclub one night time.
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“My story was a fraud,” Cohn instructed The New York Times in 1996.
“I’d only recently arrived in New York. Far from being steeped in Brooklyn street life, I hardly knew the place. As for Vincent, my story’s hero, he was largely inspired by a Shepherd’s Bush mod whom I’d known in the ’60s, a one-time king of Goldhawk road.”
“Saturday Night Fever” was based mostly on {a magazine} article by British reporter Nik Cohn that proved to be a fraud.
Despite its manufactured origins, the story has stood the take a look at of time.
“‘Saturday Night Fever’ has endured … because its narrative is as supple as the 23-year-old John Travolta was,” Entertainment Weekly wrote in an insightful Nineteen Nineties retrospective, quickly after the fraud was revealed.
It’s “the story of a working-class palooka who thinks he’s got only one special thing — his dancing — and his struggle to understand if being a man means using it or transcending it, remaining a boy or growing up, behaving as a lover, a lout, or a gentleman.”
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