Prompted by Dwight Garner's review of a collection of Nik Cohn's articles and a sense of eventual inevitability. Englishman Cohn wrote the source material (Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night (1976)) that Norman Wexler (Serpico (1973)) massaged into a script that John Badham (WarGames (1983)) directed.
John Travolta's first big-screen splash, and it got him a deserved Oscar nom. The dialogue is mostly very amusing but he and it are let down by a scenario that struggles for plot when it should've settled for character and scene: disco and the Bee Gees, they speak loud and clear, then and now. It does function as a time capsule for some part of Brooklyn and the graffiti-encrusted subway that only our main man is brave enough to use. The elements of romcom involving dream-dancer/girlfriend Karen Lynn Gorney (David and Lisa (1962)) provide little heat or light, unlike the polyester suits. Brother Martin Shakar pulling the ripcord on the priesthood seemed totally irrelevant.
The cinematography is generally fine in mostly a realism style, out on the streets, but flags in the discotheque: the lights at the same height as faces erase features and there are too many shots from below that occlude the important stuff.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars at the time and four stars as a "great movie" in 1999. This was Siskel's favourite film; Ebert keeps circling back to La Dolce Vita (1960) as some kind of biographical touchstone. Janet Maslin. IMDB trivia: instant retro. Who even knew there was a sequel (1983)? Directed by Sylvester Stallone! — one star from Roger Ebert.
