Saturday Night Fever
November 2002 Reviewed by: Rad Bennett Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

When Saturday Night Fever was released in 1977, disco was an underground entertainment that was about to die out. The movie gave it new life, dictating and defining it as the identifying music of an era. Not just the music flourished. Fashions imitated those in the movie; polyester shirts and white suits were suddenly in. The movie was the favorite of the late film critic Gene Siskel, who acquired John Travolta’s original white suit for his collection of memorabilia. Reaching way beyond entertainment, the movie became a cultural phenomenon. Today, it seems a bit dated, but is still powerful as a portrait of a particular time in history, thanks to Travolta’s magnetic performance as Tony Manero and a singularly intelligent screenplay by Norman Wexler.

Thanks to the overwhelming success of Saturday Night Fever, Travolta, who had also been on Broadway for a while before going in front of a movie camera, was the logical choice for the lead in Grease, which was filmed a year later. Looking for a female lead who could hold her own against the immensely popular young star, the producers decided on Olivia Newton-John, arguably the most popular singer of that period. Together, the two stars struck sparks and achieved a dramatic and artistic success that made audiences suspend belief that these mid-20s actors could be high school teenagers. Travolta was electric in both movies, his dancing poised and energetic, his singing sure of pitch and rhythm. Seeing Saturday Night Fever again makes one wish that the actor had kept doing musicals rather than switching solely to drama and comedy.

Saturday Night Fever has always been considered a treasure in Paramount’s vaults, and during the dawn of laserdisc it was quickly brought out in an atrociously transferred pan-and-scan version that had poor color and even worse sound. It is good to be able to report, then, that its DVD debut is astonishingly good. The dark, night-scene exterior colors as well as the smoky-hot red hues in the disco scenes, come across with complete success. Contrast is ideal and nothing is ever lost in murkiness. Excellent detail and consistently sharp images allow every cinematic nuance to come through.

The sound has been re-mixed to Dolby Digital 5.1. Saturday Night Fever is a musical without singing from the actors. It was one of the very first movies to include songs composed specifically for it by pop artists, in this case the Bee Gees. Their disco songs, including the immensely popular "Staying Alive," have never sounded better, even on the soundtrack albums that have popped up over the years. I did yearn for more bass, though what is there is clean as the proverbial whistle. I then realized that at this early stage in Dolby recording, there was no LFE channel. Engineers did not try to achieve the lease-breaking thumps prevalent in today’s mixes.

The extras for Saturday Night Fever include a "making of" documentary that is exemplary. It superbly mixes period rehearsal and still photography with recent interviews to present a chronicle that really tells, and shows, a viewer what it was like to make this movie. There are also three deleted scenes, one of them so poorly done that we can be thankful it did not make the final cut. A trailer and a thoughtful, intelligent, and highly informative commentary by director John Badham round out the special features.

Concurrent with this movie, Paramount has remastered and released Grease and Urban Cowboy and packaged them together as The Travolta DVD Collection. The transfers of both of these films are A-plus and like Saturday Night Fever they stand the test of time and are highly entertaining. Saturday Night Fever and Grease are packaged in new slim-line cardboard "Digipak" boxes that I do not feel will hold up against time as well as the usual keep case. That should not stop you from buying these titles, which provide immense entertainment value and offer us a colorful view of the late '70s, as well as those dynamic Travolta performances.

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