The Travolta/Cage Project #17 Staying Alive (1983)
In hindsight, Sylvester Stallone co-writing and directing a sequel to Saturday Night Fever might seem comically unlikely, albeit not as unfortunate a choice as replacing the instantly iconic and unforgettable music of the Brothers Gibb with the instantly forgotten hackwork of Sylvester’s brother Frank Stallone.
But there is an unmistakable logic to giving a macho caveman of an action and sports movie maven like Sly the keys to the Saturday Night Fever franchise. The Rocky factor is hard to overstate or over-estimate. Staying Alive radically re-conceives John Travolta’s Tony Manero as a Rocky-like underdog, a plucky dreamer doggedly pursuing his dreams, a Coffee Achiever in Reagan’s America.
According to Wikipedia, "Travolta, who had just seen the film Rocky III (which Stallone wrote, directed and starred in), told his agent that he wanted a director who could bring the energy and pacing of that film to Staying Alive.” Yes, Travolta wanted that unmistakable “Sylvester Stallone” feeling and figured that Stallone himself must have it in spades.
The problem is that despite what Stallone and Travolta might believe, Saturday Night Fever and Rocky are very different movies and franchises. Saturday Night Fever, for example, should NOT have been a franchise. It’s a goddamn work of art, a masterpiece, a bleak and important exploration of the seedy underbelly of the American dream. Rocky III, in sharp contrast, is a silly sports movie featuring Mr. T as Clubber Lang and Hulk Hogans as a wrestler named “Thunderlips.”
Stallone paradoxically failed Saturday Night Fever, his star, co-screenwriter Norman Wexler and producer Robert Stigwood by succeeding in giving Staying Alive the energy and pacing of a generic underdog sports film rather than the verisimilitude and masterful grasp of class and gender of Saturday Night Fever.
Tony has been purged of his impurities and imperfections. He no longer drinks. He no longer rumbles. He no longer pops pills. He’s excised racial epithets from his vocabulary and lost his low-wattage crew of losers and sycophants.
In Saturday Night Fever, Travolta makes Tony oddly, uncomfortably sympathetic despite the horrible things he says and does and the character’s fundamental spiritual and emotional ugliness. The Tony of Saturday Night Fever was an angry, racist, sexist, violent bully but because he was so brilliantly conceived and soulfully performed we ended up feeling for him in spite of his awfulness. In Staying Alive, the character is designed to be sympathetic and likable yet he’s nearly impossible to care about or root for.
Tony’s incoherent rage at a world he does not understand and that does not understand him has been replaced by a tedious determination to succeed, to triumph, to get his. Staying Alive is like its companion in this week’s episode of Travolta/Cage, Raising Arizona, in that it is, on a fundamental level, about the quest for meaning, for purpose, for self-actualization.
Stallone’s Tony Manero begins the movie in a place of pure, tedious hunger and ambition. He’s working as a waiter to help fund his Broadway dreams and enduring the purposeful leering of androgynous, sexually assertive career women who just want to have some fun with Tony when he’s focused on eating right, exercising regularly, preserving the temple that is his body, and looking out for number one, to paraphrase the title (“Look Out For Number One”) of one of the many non-Bee Gees songs polluting the film’s soundtrack.
Tony’s era-appropriate ambition leads to being cast in Satan’s Alley, which is described as a “journey through hell that ends with an ascent to heaven” that requires him to wear what can only be described as a disco diaper for much of the film’s unintentionally hilarious climax.
As in Saturday Night Fever, Tony’s past and future are represented by two very different love interests. In the Donna Pescow role of Jackie, the good, neighborhood girl Tony just can’t seem to do right by, Cynthia Rhodes is eminently forgettable. Rhodes has the dubious honor of duetting with Frank Stallone onscreen and on the soundtrack. In one of many laugh out loud moments, Tony, despite being the sexiest, most attractive man in the history of the universe, is understandably terrified that he will not be able to compete, sexually or romantically, with a man who looks AND sings like Frank Stallone.
According to a contemporary review in The New York Times, the film’s production notes claim that Frank Stallone’s compositions ''were chosen over hundreds of major contenders”, which is an infinitely funnier conceit than any of the generic rom-com banter Stallone has saddled Tony with in his bid to rid Tony of everything that makes him flawed and fascinating and messily, unmistakably, achingly human and alive.
In the role of Laura, the dancer Tony imagines is classy and educated on account of his own decidedly non-classy, uneducated background and sensibility, Finola Hughes is cold, unpleasant and superficial, a hollow echo of the heartbreakingly vulnerable social climber Karen Lynn Gorney played in Saturday Night Fever.
Laura treats Tony as a pretty face, a buff body, a good time and not a goddamn thing more. He’s a diversion, an amusement, a fuck boi before the term was invented, nothing more than a way to while away the hours between performances.
Laura treats Tony like a callow nobody because in this movie he is a callow nobody, all empty ambition and kitschy, campy hyper-sexuality. Saturday Night Fever is enduring and eminently re-watchable in no small part because it is, on a fundamental level, about a man who is beautiful and young and sexy and dances like a dream but is nevertheless a loser who will always be a loser, who cannot win because the game is rigged against dreamers like him.
Staying Alive, in sharp contrast, is obsessed with winning, with victory. It’s not enough for Tony to get cast in a big show. He needs to get bumped up to the lead role. But even that is not enough for winners like Travolta and Stallone.
In order to truly triumph in Satan’s Alley Tony needs to callously disregard all of the direction and training he’s received and start improvising wildly and erratically, whether that means going for a big solo against his director’s wishes or deciding that he’s going to kiss Laura onstage against her will, something the film depicts as the admirable assertiveness of a dynamic, can-do winner willing to risk it all, not something deeply problematic to say the least.
Stallone stages the “Satan’s Alley” set-piece, the centerpiece of the film’s enduring camp appeal, as if it is not a dance production the likes of which the screen, and also the world, has never known with the VERY prominent exception of Vixen in Showgirls, but rather as a competition to be won.
How do you win the big dance? In the most 1980s manner imaginable, of course: giving an angry middle finger to the concept of collaboration and cooperation and going for number one.
And after he’s done winning the big dance the movie gives Tony an epic victory lap when, in the only satisfying element of the film, he ends Staying Alive by strutting to the iconic sounds of the movie’s theme song.
Staying Alive is almost perversely devoid of big names for the sequel to one of the most iconic, influential and successful blockbusters of the 1970s. Other than Travolta, the biggest name in the cast is probably Kurtwood Smith as a glowering dance maven given nothing to do.
Saturday Night Fever similarly surrounded Stallone with unknown actors but there it added to the film’s bracing sense of realism. The actors playing Travolta’s buddies and women and family didn’t come to the film with an excess of cultural baggage, or any baggage at all, really, so it was easy to buy them as the desperate losers they were playing.
It works much differently this time around. Instead of lending the movie an air of Neo-realism, it feels like Stallone’s desecration of Oscar-winning Saturday Night Fever Norman Wexler’s script is so bad that the best it could muster was nighttime soap-level actresses like Hughes.
It’s not ENTIRELY true that Travolta is the only proper movie star in the movie. Sylvester Stallone’s movie star ego would not quite let him fade entirely into the background as the movie’s unseen auteur so he gave himself a cameo as a man Tony walks past on a New York street.
In Staying Alive, Stallone seems to be playing himself, in more ways than one. It’s the most hilariously distracting reminder of an unlikely director’s participation in a critically maligned Travolta vehicle this side of Fred Durst having Devon Sawa spend a good forty seconds getting his son into the music of Limp Bizkit in The Fanatic.
These two ridiculous superstar cameos feel so similar in spirit that I can’t help but wonder if Durst’s clumsy intrusion into the world of The Fanatic is a cracked homage to Stallone’s notorious exercise in self-love here.
The Fanatic is of course a notorious flop while Staying Alive was the tenth top grossing film of 1983 despite universal critical disdain.
Commercially, at least, Staying Alive was a big old hit but it remains a potent reminder that sometimes something can be a huge commercial success and a staggering creative failure at the same time.
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