Close but wrong decade and borough.
It might be zany, it might be a madcap rush through the week, heedless of the consequences, but it’s also correct — it is Saturday Night Fever.
Saturday Night Fever was, as you may know, based on an article in New York Magazine called “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night”. It was written in a kind of faux-anthropological style as the author followed Italian kids much like John Travolta’s character as they clung together in little gangs. They were always working for the weekend, much as Loverboy sang about just a few years later, working in dead end jobs, getting in scraps with their racially incompatible neighbors, pursuing unfulfilling fornications, and finding a moment of respite in the thumping rhythm of the disco floor and their fabulous vestments.
It’s kind of funny that a few decades later, the writer came clean. He made most of his article up. Saturday Night Fever came a little bit from what he saw in discos, but was even more based on the mods he knew back in England. So if anyone wanted to remake Saturday Night Fever, they could do so but set it in working class Great Britain, and it would be closer to some kind of truth. Maybe writer Nik Cohn took Ringo’s words about whether he was a mod or a rocker too closely to heart: he’s just a mocker.
- vagabonds warn of a conflagration, lettered men implore passersby to caper around
The Trammps sang about a Disco Inferno
and the Bee Gees said you should be dancing, yeah!
- two bridges: one leads to despair and death, the other leads to a better life
Kind of a red bridge/blue bridge choice, but main character Tony and his chums wax poetic about the Verrazanno-(sic)-Narrows Bridge, at that time the longest bridge in the world, where (spoiler!!) they horseplay around and pretend to fall off and the guy under the most stress actually does fall to his death. But Tony ought to focus on the Brooklyn Bridge, where he can follow in his unrequited love’s footsteps into a wider, more fulfilling world. (Also, hey Staten Island, vaffanculo, right? Manhattan is where it’s at!)
- a raid on a neighboring tribe seems successful, but…
In a sign that Tony’s friends are all assholes, even though he’s one of them, he and his crew beat up a quasi-rival quasi-gang of Latins in revenge for them beating up one of their guys. But then (spoiler!) it turns out that their guy that got beaten up badly enough to go to the hospital might have been making up the whole thing! What is this, a Twilight Zone episode? Sto’ cazzo!
- a former holy man can’t help but be sought out for spiritual counsel
Tony’s brother Frank Jr. drifts in and out of the movie. He was a Catholic priest, and their parents loved their golden godly boy. Then he quit for unexpressed reasons (though an allergy to celibacy is the prime suspect), and it’s another sign that existing institutions are breaking down. But Tony’s friend can’t help asking Frankie if maybe it’d be okay, Catholicism-wise, if his girlfriend got an abortion. Confession is good for someone’s soul, if not the ex-priest.
- Faces and floors
Faces is a thing from the bullshit article mentioned above, and is also mentioned in some easily missed dialogue, but Tony and crew call themselves “Faces” as if they could be called “braves” or “rakes” or “goodfellas” or “3rd level rogues” or something — guys that spend a lot of money and time on looking good and are relatively loyal to each other. And the floors, of course, are the well-lit disco dance floors that must have seemed like science fiction to anyone from a previous generation.
(The name of their favorite discotheque is the 2001 Odyssey, which is a cool name for a club in the mid '70s. Hey, anyone want to grab drinks at Edge of Tomorrow? How about we go dancing at the 2049 Blade Runner? Or maybe go snort something at the Mad Max Road?)
- a spectacularly reflective orb
And above the dance floor is the disco ball.
@dtolman, do you find that life’s goin’ nowhere, somebody help me, somebody help me please? Just stay alive — and choose the next movie!