Saturday Night Fever 30th Anniversary Collectors Edition (1977)

"...the disco film of the decade...  Box Office Magazine
"A small, solid film, made with craft...  Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
"Travolta molds what could have been an equally obvious character into a substantial, tragic figure.  Entertainment Weekly
"One minute into Saturday Night Fever you know this picture is onto something, that it knows what it's talking about.  Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune
"A powerful sense of place pervades.  Nick Hilditch, BBC Film Review
"One of the best films of all time.  Clint Morris, MovieHole
"...captures the disco subculture of the 1970s like no other...[and] features a star-making performance from John Travolta who dominates every frame.  Emanuel Levy, EmanuelLevy.com

Editor's Note Director John Badham's hit film propelled John Travolta to stardom, made white polyester suits an instant fashion craze, and garnered praise for its portrayal of blue-collar life. Nineteen-year-old Brooklyn native Tony Manero (Travolta) lives for Saturday nights at the local disco, where he's king of the club, thanks to his stylish moves on the dance floor. But outside of the club, things don't look so rosy. At home, Tony fights constantly with his father and has to compete with his family's starry-eyed view of his older brother, a priest. Nor can he find satisfaction at his dead-end job at a paint store. However, things begin to change when he spies Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney) in the disco and starts training with her for the club's dance competition. Stephanie dreams of the world beyond Brooklyn, and her plans to move to the big city just over the bridge soon change Tony's life forever. This portrait of young Brooklyn natives struggling to escape their sheltered lives for freedom and adventure in the big city of Manhattan defined a generation of disco dancers and 1970s youths rebelling against the more traditional expectations of their parents. Set to the popular dance music of the Bee Gees, this instant cinematic sensation revealed the fashions and aspirations of an underground culture to the world.

	Barry Miller
	John Travolta
	Joseph Cali
	Karen Lynn Gorney
	Barry Gibb, et. al. - Original Music By
	Charles Bailey - Production Designer
	David Rawlins - Editor
	John Badham - Director
	Kevin McCormick - Executive Producer
	Nik Cohn - Based On Magazine Article By
	Norman Wexler - Screenplay
	Ralf D. Bode - Cinematographer
	Robert Stigwood - Producer

The film that made John Travolta a household name is set in Brooklyn to the popular dance music of the Bee Gees. Tony Manero (Travolta) is a paint-store clerk who becomes the king of the discotheque when he puts on his polyester and gets down, with a little help from a social-climbing Manhattan secretary (Karen Lynn Gorney). This definitive portrait of a generation of disco dancers in the 1970s skyrocketed its young star to fame and further propelled the disco inferno infatutation.

"Would ya watch the hair! Ya know, I spend a long time on my hair and he hit it----he hit my hair."----Tony Manero (John Travolta) to his family

"Maybe if you ain't so good, I ain't so bad."----Tony Manero to Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney)

New York Times
"...Travolta is deft and vibrant and he never condescends to the character....The music moves with a real spring it is step, and the movie does too." 12/16/1977 p.C10

USA Today
"...Among the definitive time-capsule pics of any era....It looks and sounds snappy..." 10/11/2002 p.7E

Entertainment Weekly
"...Travolta melds brute machismo and hidden yearning; it's little surprise FEVER made him a superstar and earned him an Oscar nomination..." 10/18/2002 p.95

Premiere
"[G]iven a subtle sweetness and vulnerability by Travolta's layered performance." 04/01/2004 p.58

Uncut
4 stars out of 5 -- "[The film] still plays like an impossibly bleak slice of kitchen-sink realism..." 11/01/2007 p.152

Empire
4 stars out of 5 -- "[Travolta] pure, chest-out charisma. The camera loves him -- and he loves it right back." 11/01/2007 p.202

Ultimate DVD
4 stars out of 5 -- "[A] mesmerizing portrait from Travolta ensures it stays evergreen." 12/01/2007 p.95

FilmCritic.com 7 of 10
Time and the selectiveness of memory has recorded Saturday Night Fever as a fun romp about disco and little more. Check out the reviews online -- they talk about how great the Bee Gees music is, John Travolta's dance moves, his hairdo, and his Brooklyn swagger...When Tony's dancing, Saturday Night Fever is a true dance classic that puts its contemporaries to shame. But when the melodrama thickens -- notably during the last 40 or so minutes of the film -- SNF approaches unwatchability, as what ought to be a precious little film starts to take itself way too seriously...While Fran Drescher has a tiny role, you won't recognize any of the names of Tony's co-stars -- namely because they just weren't that great as actors. Travolta, of course, is fantastic (maybe for the only time in his career). His ad-libbing about his hair alone is enough to merit remembering SNF as a classic. - Christopher Null

Chicago Sun-Times 9 of 10
"Saturday Night Fever" is an especially hard-edged case and a very good movie. It's about a bunch of Brooklyn kids who aren't exactly delinquents but are fearsomely tough and cynical and raise a lot of hell on Saturday nights...The Brooklyn we see in "Saturday Night Fever" reminds us a lot of New York's Little Italy as Martin Scorsese saw it in "Who's That Knocking at My Door?" and "Mean Streets." The characters are similar: They have few aims or ambitions and little hope of breaking out to the larger world of success -- a world symbolized for them by Manhattan, and the Brooklyn Bridge reaching out powerfully toward it...But "Saturday Night Fever" isn't as serious as the Scorsese films. It does, after all, have almost wall-to-wall music in it...And there are the funny scenes (like the one where Travolta shouts at his father: "You hit my hair!") to balance the tragic and self-destructive ones...There's also a hint of "Rocky," whose poster Travolta's character has on his bedroom wall. Travolta meets a Brooklyn girl (Karen Gorney) who's made it in Manhattan, sort of, as a secretary. She comes back to Brooklyn to dance, and they team up to enter a $500 disco contest. They win it, too, but not before winning has become meaningless to Travolta. Their relationship is interesting because Travolta sees Miss Gorney not so much as a girl (although he thinks she's beautiful) but as an example of how he might escape Brooklyn...The movie's musical and dancing sequences are dazzling. Travolta and Miss Gorney are great together, and Travolta does one solo (in an unbroken shot) that the audiences cheered for. The movie was directed by John Badham ("The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars"), and his camera occupies the dance floor so well that we really do understand the lure of the disco world, for all of the emptiness and cruelty the characters find there. - Roger Ebert

Apollo Movie Guide 8 of 10
Lost amidst all the hoopla and now-legendary disco stuff is the fact that John Badham's Saturday Night Fever is actually an effectively gritty and somewhat touching New Yawk drama. Sure, it's no Mean Streets, but there's clearly a lot more here than just a lot of colourful dance floors, swivelling hips and Bee-Gees...John Travolta is (of course) Tony Manero, fitful Italian upstart and reigning king of the Brooklyn disco scene. Tony's talents on the dance floor are superseded solely by his dreams of escape. Living in his family's house (and always under the shadow of his adored priest of a big brother) and seemingly well aware of the fleeting nature of local fame, Tony (despite his urbane manner and 'deese dose' speech patterns) simply wants to evolve into 'something'...For the time being, that something will have to be disco dancing, and make no mistake: Tony (and his real-life counterpart Travolta) knows how to dance. Lording over the late-night discos like an unassuming monarch, Tony takes great pride in his boogieing prowess...Other than the famously influential dancing material (and the omnipresent soundtrack songs), there's not a whole lot that's stunningly unique about Saturday Night Fever. The 'angry young man' material's been covered numerous times before, but in earlier cases, the protagonist often ends up in jail, on drugs, or laden with bullet holes. The message here may be a little simple, but it's delivered with a strong performance by Travolta, a screenplay that only occasionally wanders into outright melodrama, and the hip-swinging-est, bell-bottom-est dance moves ever captured just prior to disco's welcome demise...Some movies don't stand the test of time because they simply become outdated. Saturday Night Fever is the very epitome of 'outdated', but oddly enough that's what makes it such a (mini) classic. - Scott Weinberg