Saturday Night Fever Original Soundtrack [Game-Changers]

The inaugural essay in my new Game-Changers series dives deep into the runaway disco success story.

Unlike the vibes most commonly associated with its soundtrack, Saturday Night Fever the film is a grim, gritty, and, at times, downright ugly portrait of late-70s youth culture. Despite all his posing and preening at the local nightclub, John Travolta’s Tony Manero is bad news, working a dead-end job he tolerates only as a means to fuel his Saturday nights spent lording over the dancefloor. He and his posse are seemingly never less than a hair away from an outburst of physical or sexual violence, which makes the fallout from the climactic dance contest sequence an uncomfortable watch at best. Near the end of the film, Tony’s would-be love interest outs him as a “known rapist” after letting him into her apartment. I could go on, but you get the idea.

I bring all this up because, if you were to stop a random person on the street and utter the words “Saturday Night Fever” to them, almost no one associates the film or its standing as a pop culture touchstone with these plot points. Instead, many will strike the famous finger-or-first-in-the-air pose, reference scenes like these, or try and harmonize by themselves. They are fond memories projected hazily on the actual text, mainly because, as Roger Ebert put it in his review, “what you remember is John Travolta [in] that classic white disco suit, and the Bee Gees on the soundtrack.”