Big Picture: Saturday Night Fever (1977)
- Presented By: Tampa Theatre
- Dates: March 26, 2025
- Time: 8:00 PM
- 711 N Franklin St, Tampa, FL 33602
- Price: $7-$10
Tampa Theatre
For the next subject of our new monthly Big Picture series, Tampa Theatre offers Dancing, Through Life: a selection of films that all center the experience of dance as a method of escape — escape from a difficult life, escape from an adversarial world, even transcendent escape from the mundane into ecstatic beauty.
Big Picture: Saturday Night Fever (1977)
If all you know about Saturday Night Fever is white suits with spread collars, diagonal pointing and that one Bee Gees song, prepare to be surprised. SNF tells the story of Tony Manero (John Travolta), an Italian kid from Bay Ridge who lives at home, works a dead-end job and radically transforms, like Clark Kent becoming Superman, whenever he can visit the local discotheque (named 2001 Odyssey, no kidding) and take over the dance floor.
But there’s always a last call, and the world waiting outside for him when he leaves the club is miserable. He and his friends are violent, risk-taking dead-enders with no hope and no future. His brother Frank left the Catholic priesthood because he got his girlfriend pregnant, and it tears his family up. The stakes are high; Tony has to get out of this life of despair and suffering before he dies or ends up in jail. Dancing is the only good thing he has going; is that enough to make him choose better? Is it too much to hope that Tony can change?