I finally saw the movie Dirty Dancing (1987). My wife had seen it years before, but misremembered parts of it. We went to a matinee at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany in early July.
One thing that worked that should not have was the seemingly seamless mix of music from the early 1960s and mid-1980s. One critic noted: “The dance finale…, although an obvious crowd-pleaser, is performed to a contemporary song, clearly intended for the charts, which blows the period feel right off the dance floor.” I think is mitigated largely by the voice of former Righteous Brother Bill Medley, whose duet with Jennifer Warnes, Time Of My Life, seemed to fit.
As a couple of critics noted, the film was pro-sex. The seeming differences between the haves, such as the family of Baby/Frances (Jennifer Grey), and the performers, such as Johnny (Patrick Swayze), gave it a certain Romeo and Juliet vibe, except that (SPOILER!) no one dies.
In many ways, the film’s hero was Baby’s father, Dr. Jake Houseman, played by the late, great Jerry Orbach, whose relationship with his daughter is one of the two most important in the movie.
The Rotten Tomatoes scores were 72% positive with critics and 90% with audiences. The negatives were that it was “dull and charmless,” “boring,” “blah,” and/or “objects of choreography used to push a thoughtless agenda of sound and movement.” Meh.
Bias
While I liked it far more than I thought I would, separating the movie from the vaguely familiar setting, a Borscht Belt resort, isn’t easy. I traveled past a few of these buildings in the Catskill Mountains. “The movie is based on Grossinger’s, “a major star in the upstate New York constellation of recreation.
“Alan Zweibel, one of the original writers on “Saturday Night Live,” is writing “The Mountains,” a show about Grossinger’s, Deadline reports… The Liberty, New York, mainstay known for supplying luxury and entertainment closed in 1986.”
Deep in the recesses of my memory, I know I’d been in one of the resorts, but I don’t think it was with my family. Could it have been a high school choir trip? I distinctly remember the separation of meat and milk.
The movie also nameschecks New Paltz, where I went to college.
We watched this a couple months ago! It was one of those movies that I was sure I’d seen at SOME point, and yet…maybe not? Anyway, if I HAD seen it, it would have been so long ago that I don’t remember it. I liked it, it was good, but do I understand its classic status? In all honesty, I do not. I think it lives in memory mainly because Patrick Swayze was pretty beloved (and not without reason, as far as I know). I think if it had a harder edge to the way it depicts the class differences in the movie, I might have liked it better.