Saturday Night Fever (1977)

'Are you as good in bed as you are on that dance floor?'

‘White polyester, static-inducing shirts and platform shoes…’

On the evening of Thursday, July 12th 1979, a crate filled with disco records was blown up on a baseball field at Comiskey Park, Chicago, home of the White Sox. 'Disco Demolition Night'- supposedly a promotion for Major League Baseball- ended in a pitch invasion followed by a riot. Thousands of baseball fans, whipped into a disco-hating frenzy by DJ Steve Dahl, ran onto the field, lighting fires and throwing disco records around like frisbees- until dispersed by riot police. And so began the Last Days of Disco.

If there was ever a misunderstood classic, it's this one: Saturday Night Fever (1977). Sometimes, our vision of the past becomes crystallised. Take the contemporary visual interpretation of the 1920s. The now clichéd flapper look (the headband, the feather boa and the short, glittery dress, beloved of fancy dress hire) became fixed in time to a date around 1927. And the same thing happened with Saturday Night Fever (1977)- in truth, a rather gritty, edgy and well-made low-budget 'art house' film about working-class culture in Brooklyn- so that by the mid-to-late 80s (Disco Sucks!) the idea of the 'cheesy' 1970s had transmogrified into a polyester nightmare of cream flares, static-inducing shirts, and gold-plated medallions nestling in hairy chests matted with sun oil. As Josh in Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco (1998) says:

'Disco will never be over. It will always live in our minds and hearts. Something like this that was this big, and this important, and this great, will never die. Oh for a few years, maybe for many years it will be considered passé and ridiculous. It will be misrepresented, caricatured and sneered at, or worse, completely ignored. People will laugh about John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, white polyester suits and platform shoes... but we had nothing to do with those things and still loved disco...

Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco (1998): ‘Disco will always live in our minds and hearts…’