Saturday Night Fever

A disco movie for people who don't go to discos, this is really about Growing Up - which the movie interprets as Growing Out of a Disco Mentality and into Personal Relationships. The relationship between Tony (Travolta) and Stephanie (Gorney) is at least as angst-ridden as anything in Annie Hall, but like almost everything else in the movie, it's played dead straight. This, of course, makes it extremely funny, up to a point, though in the end the real killer is the movie's abject sincerity. Pity, really, since there's certainly room for at least one decent movie about the actual appeal and experience of discos. The only true drug culture of the '70s, they deserve better than to be represented as watering-holes for arrested adolescents.