Saturday Night Fever

John Travolta graduated from minor celebrity to superstar with Saturday Night Fever. Travolta plays Tony Manero, a Brooklyn paint-store clerk who'd give anything to break out of his dead-end existence. In life, Tony is a peasant; on the disco dance floor, he's a king. As the soundtrack plays one Bee ...more

From the moment John Travolta strutted down a Brooklyn street to "Stayin' Alive" at the beginning of Saturday Night Fever (1977), music movies and pop culture were irrevocably changed. Unlike subsequent music blockbusters like Grease (1978) and Footloose (1984), Fever's depiction of one youth's escape at the local disco and tentative dreams for a better life in Manhattan astutely balanced galvanizing dance numbers with a gritty sense of contemporary economic malaise. Dance numbers, the Bee Gees ...more