‘Saturday Night Fever’: The Gritty, Underdog Tale Struts on 40 Years Later


A tough group of Italian-American youths, led by John Travolta, took the world by storm in 1977.

The following article, written by Robert Cashill, appears on Biography.com. 

Disco is dead, but Saturday Night Fever is stayin’ alive. Released across America on Dec. 16, 1977, the story of a working-class teen who dances his way out of a dead-end life in working-class Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, was an immediate sensation. The film displaced Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind to top the box office and remained there for two more months, emerging as the fifth biggest film of the year. Its soundtrack was also No. 1, with a bullet — a full six months atop the charts, only falling off in March 1980, by which time it had sold 16 million records and become the only disco disc to win the Best Album Grammy.

Continue reading at Biography.com. 

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