The 1978 Smash Grease Is Vulgar, Lurid and Horny as Hell. That's What Makes It So Great!
At this point in our story we should probably establish that while Nicolas Cage did some fine, distinctive work early in his career in film, particularly as the lead in Valley Girl, his rival and future costar John Travolta was getting off to one of the best starts in the history of American entertainment.
Travolta’s career began with the iconic smashes that would make his name: Carrie! Welcome Back, Kotter! The Boy in the Plastic Bubble! Saturday Night Fever! Grease! In his explosively sexy, radiant youth, Travolta leaped from apex to apex. Television, movies, music, the front covers of teen magazines: Travolta dominated them all, wracking up five top 40 hits in his sideline as a sometimes pop star.
If Travolta had died after the making of Grease, he would have been lionized as the James Dean of the 1970s, a natural superstar who blazed a trail of greatness during his brief time on earth, then was taken away too soon. Travolta forged a powerful emotional connection with his public early in his career that has withstood countless terrible movies that have served as public crucibles testing the public’s enduring love for the superstar.
Oh, but the public’s blind devotion to the man been tested, over and over and over again! Yet our feverish adoration for Tony Manero and Danny Zuko endures, seemingly growing greater with time rather than receding. Throw on ANY song from Saturday Night Fever or Grease at a wedding and white people will lose their goddamn mind.
EVERY fucking song on the Grease soundtrack is a motherfucking jam. Even “Hand Jive.” You know how most famous, wildly successful musicals introduce a song or maybe two that catches on, that everybody knows the words to whether they’ve even seen the movie or show that produced them? That’s EVERY song here. It’s got a Thriller-level hit to even bigger hit ratio.
Four decades after Grease’s extraordinary success white people still gather to re-live its many iconic moments in a sacred ritual known as the Grease sing-along. It’s not enough for them to merely watch the movie for the fourteenth time in the presence of fellow obsessives: no, they have to sing along to the screen on some Oogieloves in the Big Balloon interactive type-shit because the urge to sing out loud despite being in a movie theater is just too goddamn strong to resist, both individually and en masse.
That is some seriously mojo. And it’s not surprising or unearned. Grease plugged one of the most explosively charming entertainers of the past century into a sure-fire crowd-pleaser overflowing with kitschy, campy, vulgar nostalgia uniquely suited to his gifts not just as an actor but as a performer, a consummate showman who sings and dances and oozes sex appeal and movie star magnetism.
As written, Danny Zuko is a bit of a dolt, a preening, pretty Neanderthal whose bone-headed maleness and weakness for macho posturing proves the biggest/only impediment to his righteous romance with pure-hearted soulmate Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) but Travolta gives the character an unexpected puppy dog sweetness.
This is, after all, a wildly insecure alpha male who impresses his posse of fellow T-Bird greasers with an account of the beautiful women he fell for at the beach in “Summer Loving” and when confronted with clear-cut evidence of that romantic fling in the form of Sandy in the flesh he immediately reverts to Andrew “Dice” Clay dickishness, admitting of his feelings towards Sandy only, “That’s cool, baby! You know how it is, rocking and rolling and whanot.”
Danny apparently thinks that having romantic or emotional feelings towards a woman makes you unacceptably effeminate and soft, even gay, and that real heterosexual men think girls are gross and have cooties and treat them with an appropriate level of disdain.
Danny can’t possibly let his crew know that the stunningly beautiful woman in front of them is, in fact, the same woman he was bragging about in song mere moments earlier because it would violate the Bro Code or something even though all of his fellow greasers/gang members have girlfriends as well.
Eddie Deezen is seemingly the only cast member without a girlfriend, undoubtedly because no mere human woman could handle his sexual energy and appetites, yet Danny inexplicably spends the film worrying that admitting that he likes Sandy on more than just a physical level will lead to being socially ostracized.
Grease has perversely low stakes. Bad girl Rizzo (the wonderful Stockard Channing, thirty three years young when the film was shot) is pregnant and then actually she is not. Will Danny win some bullshit car race it’s impossible to care about? What about Frenchy? Will Beauty School prove her personal and professional salvation? Finally, will Danny stop being a dumbass long enough for true love to happen between him and the girl of his dreams?
The answers to the questions will not surprise you but Grease is not dependent upon plotting or characterization. No, the appeal of Grease is, always has been, and always will be rooted in sex, in nostalgia, both for the cultural era that produced it and the halcyon period during which it is is set, music, hormones, movie star charisma, the explosive romantic and personal chemistry between its leads and of course all of that music and all of that dancing.
Re-watching Grease I was surprised by its raunchiness despite knowing damn well from previous viewings that this is a very smutty movie about teenagers fucking. I think that’s because I came to it as a movie that pretty much every American ten-year-old sees, possibly at a sleepover of some sort, and subsequently goes on to play way too prominent a role in determining how they see the 1960s, the heightened, crazy emotions of adolescence and sex.
If you look at Grease as a sleepover classic and quintessential piece of retro Americana generation upon generation of grown-ups unthinkingly and perhaps irresponsibly determined was perfectly acceptable viewing for small children then it is easy to be surprised, even shocked by its pervasive dirtiness. In this light, lines like the T-Birds asking Danny if Sandy “put up a fight”, the T-Birds’ car being a really “Pussy Wagon” whose sensual curves and exhilarating velocity will make girls “cream” feel transgressive and not just dirty but filthy.
In the context of #MeToo, meanwhile, a very minor subplot involving Alan Freed-like superstar DJ Vince Fontaine (Ed Byrnes, radiating seriously creepy perverted old man energy) desperately trying to leverage his rock and roll fame for a quick, sordid fling with an underage fan feels way too dark to be appropriate for a popcorn musical aimed at kids, particularly a bad-taste punchline where one of the Pink Ladies complains about him trying to put aspirin in her Coke.
The implicit promise of most car songs is that if you have a nice enough vehicle beautiful women will straight up fist-fight each other for the honor of fucking you. Grease doesn’t trust audiences to merely infer that its characters think there is a direct link between the condition and quality of their car and the amount of sex it will lead to so there is an entire gloriously tacky song and dance number explicitly documenting the connection between having a sweet-ass ride and getting laid.
In “Greased Lightning”, Travolta channels a young Elvis Presley, perhaps the only historical figure sexier than himself. Thanks to Travolta, we can’t help but love this knucklehead in spite of everything he says and does and thinks.
But if you look at Grease as a tacky teen sex comedy from the height of the disco era and the end of the Cocaine 1970s (which were about to crash smack-dab into the Cocaine 1980s) then its raunch is neither surprising or particularly inappropriate. Grease is a sublimely vulgar ode to sexual desire and the hormonal tidal wave of adolescent that skips giddily and deliriously from one instantly iconic production number to another.
Choreographer Patricia Birch, who would take over as director from Boy in the Plastic Bubble auteur Randal Kleiser in the 1982 sequel, specializes in large-scale dance sequences when dozens upon dozens of fake teenagers, many clearly approaching forty, gyrate in unison in production numbers defined by a level of energy and speed remarkable even for productions where everyone is clearly on some manner of powerful stimulant.
In 1970s Hollywood a lot of folks in front of the camera as well as behind it felt like they’d done so much cocaine that it felt like they could fly. Grease makes this distressingly common sensation deliciously, perversely literal by ending with a powerhouse group sing-along AND Danny and Sandy defying the laws of gravity and the dictates of reality by exiting the blockbuster in a MOTHERFUCKING FLYING CAR.
A flying car! Like The Apple or something! How is that possible? When did this weird movie turn into a fantasy? Are Danny and Sandy dead? Are they ascending to the Heaviside Layer after winning the Jellicle Ball? Or are they merely going to a place where Grease 2 does not exist, where it can not exist?
Travolta would go on to make better films than Grease but in a very real way this feels like the pinnacle for him as an entertainer, not just actor. Travolta would never be younger, or sexier, or more irresistible than he is in Grease. He would never have as pure a vehicle for his talents as a singer, dancer, actor and icon.
In that respect there’s something a little melancholy about Travolta’s triumph here as well.
The back to back to back to back to back successes of Carrie, Welcome Back, Kotter, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, Saturday Night Fever and Grease left Travolta’s career with nowhere to go but down. His next film, 1978’s Moment by Moment, would be as staggeringly unsuccessful as the films that preceded it were wildly popular and influential.
In the decades ahead Travolta would come to be known more for historic failures and public humiliations than his increasingly rare successes but at the glorious beginning, there were only triumphs as the multi-hyphenate’s star rose to such impossible heights that a fall was inevitable, but we never could have imagined how far that fall would ultimately prove to be.
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