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On Dec. 16, 1977, Paramount released Saturday Night Fever in theaters, where it would go on to gross more than $90 million domestically and then garner an Oscar nomination for John Travolta in the leading actor category at the 50th Academy Awards. The Hollywood Reporter’s original review is below:

Saturday Night Fever is a kick, a film that ostensibly promises little more than a showcase for the highvoltage personality of TV’s John Travolta, but one that grows progressively more involved and involving as it explores the rites of passage of today’s urban teenagers. It even takes some of the shock of American Graffiti‘s closing title and builds it into the script.

The comparison to Graffiti is not gratuitous. Where the earlier film proffered a fond farewell to the innocence of the ’50s, Saturday Night suggests that while useful high spirits still remain, the innocence is long gone. Substitute now...

Over 50 years ago, Sidney Lumet released "Serpico," a powerful indictment of NYPD police corruption that was based on a true story. Decades later, New York's "boys in blue" are still being consistently called out for corruption, but at the time of the film's release in 1973, "Serpico" felt like it might just cause a sea change in the way America — or at least Hollywood — saw its law enforcement systems. "Sidney Lumet's 'Serpico,' the first in what threatens to be an avalanche of movies about policemen, picks up the old cop film and brings it with lights flashing and sirens blaring into the middle of the Watergate era," Vincent Canby wrote in his original review for the New York Times.

"Serpico" may not have ended up changing the world, but the movie based on the book of the same name by Peter Maas was a box office and critical hit,...

Chicago – Patrick McDonald of HollywoodChicago.com appears on Ian Simmons’ Vodcast, Kicking The Seat, talking the 1973 Cop Drama classic, “Serpico” … it’s 50th Anniversary. Why was this particular anniversary film chosen? Because it was once parodied in Mad Magazine as “Serpicool.”

Frank Serpico (Al Pacino) is a New York City cop in the 1960s/70s. Unlike all his colleagues, he refuses a share of the money that the cops routinely extort from local criminals. As he goes undercover, nobody wants to work with Serpico, and he’s in constant danger of being placed in life threatening positions by his “partners.” Nothing seems to get done even when he goes to the highest of authorities, but he still hopes that one day the truth will be known.

‘Serpico’ on Kicking The Seat

Photo credit: Patrick McDonald for HollywoodChicago.com

Kicking The Seat is an Ian Simmons’ Joint covering the spectrum of film,...

Powerful story of disguise and alienation is led by the moral passion of Pacino’s countercultural whistleblower

Film-making guts and glory are on display from director Sidney Lumet, star Al Pacino and many others in this compelling New York crime drama from 1973. It is based on the true story of whistleblowing police officer Frank Serpico who, outraged by the top-to-bottom corruption in the NYPD, finally went to the New York Times with his evidence. In revenge, dirty cops knowingly led Serpico into a dangerous standoff with armed criminals in an apartment building and left him undefended to be shot in the face. Screenwriters Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler adapted the bestseller from journalist Peter Maas’s book about the police officer’s remarkable life, on which Serpico collaborated almost immediately on being invalided out of the department.

Serpico is a classic movie of 1970s New York: it has Tony Roberts,...

Tom Hanks. Michael J. Fox. George Clooney. Jennifer Aniston. Kristen Wiig. These are just a few of the actors that managed to make the transition from television to movies, but John Travolta made the move before each of them. In 1976, producer Robert Stigwood took a very big gamble on the young TV star, signing Travolta to a million-dollar contract to star in three feature films. The movie version of the hit Broadway musical "Grease" was slated to be the first project to launch Travolta into a full-fledged leading man, but the musical was still so popular, production on the film wasn't allowed to begin until 1978. 

While Manhattan was still stuck in the swinging sixties, disco was happening in the other four boroughs. The underground movement inspired an English rock critic named Nik Cohn to write an article in New York magazine focusing on the blue-collar Italian kids in Bay Ridge,...

Joe.Movie-lovers!Welcome back to The Deuce Notebook, a collaboration between Mubi's Notebook and The Deuce Film Series, our monthly event at Nitehawk Williamsburg that excavates the facts and fantasies of cinema's most infamous block in the world: 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. For each screening, my co-hosts and I pick a title that we think embodies the era of 24-hour moviegoing, and present the venue at which it premiered…This month, we welcome yet another guest writer, Jason Bailey. Jason is a film critic, historian, and author. His most recent book, “Fun City Cinema: New York City and the Movies That Made It,” tracks the intersections between New York movies and the city’s history. That is also the subject of his “Fun City Cinema” podcast, and the following essay was adapted from the episode “Keep America Great.” Special thanks to co-host Mike Hull and guests Jefferson Cowie,...

Joe

Blu ray

Olive Films

1970 /1:85 / Street Date April 24, 2018

Starring Peter Boyle, Susan Sarandon

Cinematography by John Avildsen

Written by Norman Wexler

Directed by John Avildsen

Galvanized by Martin Luther King’s assassination, an army of protestors descended upon 1968’s Democratic convention then playing out on Chicago’s south side. They were greeted by an enraged mayor who made sure there would be no contest between his men in blue and their bell-bottemed adversaries – cops came out swinging and left Michigan Avenue swimming in blood and the smell of tear gas.

Like Vietnam, Richard Daley’s Windy city purge was a living room war – a TV sensation that ensured the whole world would be watching. It took some time for movies to catch up. Films like Medium Cool and Easy Rider met the head-cracking controversy head on but big studio releases related to this particular counter-culture moment tended toward docile...

Filmmaker John G. Avildsen, known for genuinely authentic dramas that often celebrated the heroism of everyday people, such as Rocky and The Karate Kid, has passed away according to Los Angeles Times. He was 81.  The director won an Academy Award for his work on Rocky, a modestly told, winning tale about an underdog who gets the chance to fight the heavyweight champion. Sylvester Stallone, who wrote the original script and starred, earned an Academy Award nomination; the movie won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Film Editing.   Prior to that, Avildsen had earned critical plaudits for Joe, which bracingly confronted the class and cultural differences that increasingly divided the country. Norman Wexler's screenplay was nominated for an Academy...

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Don Kaye May 15, 2017

Director John Badman looks back at his disco classic four decades later...

Saturday Night Fever is the film that made John Travolta into a legitimate star, launched the Bee Gees to the pinnacle of pop success and introduced the world to the subculture, music and fashion of disco dancing - specifically the scene in the clubs of the insular blue collar Brooklyn neighbourhood of Bay Ridge. The movie made the scene and music into a national phenomenon that lasted several years, until the disco craze petered out in the early '80s.

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The whole thing was based on a New York magazine article called 'Tribal Rites Of The New Saturday Night', written by a British journalist named...

By Alex Simon

“Trumpet in a herd of elephants; / Crow in the company of cocks; / Bleat in a flock of goats.”—Mayan proverb.

“Frank, let's face it: who can trust a cop that won't take money?” –A fellow cop to Frank Serpico (Al Pacino)

In 1973, between the first two Godfather films, Al Pacino hung his hat on another iconic film and character of ‘70s cinema. Based on the true story of New York City Police Detective Frank Serpico, who in 1971 broke the code of silence unofficially understood by every cop to be sacrosanct and testified before the Knapp Commission, a government inquiry into NYPD police corruption. Serpico’s story quickly become big news, and a best-selling non-fiction book by Peter Maas. Sidney Lumet’s film of Serpico, written by celebrated screenwriters Norman Wexler and Waldo Salt, took the policier further into gritty new territory that had been forged two years...

As Bob Zmuda tells it, screenwriter Norman Wexler used to tote a briefcase full of thousands of dollars to pay off the many people that he pissed off each day. Zmuda — the comedian, writer, tall-tale dispenser, and longtime wrangler of Andy Kaufman — dished his best Wexler story on Marc Maron's Wtf podcast in 2012. Annoyed at the service in a bakery where he had tried to purchase a jelly doughnut, Wexler, the writer of Serpico and Saturday Night Fever, purportedly began tossing cash around to buy everything else in the joint: the pastries, then the ingredients, then the fixtures, and finally the clothes of the employees, to be doffed right then and there.

It's a hilar...

"Sidney Lumet, a director who preferred the streets of New York to the back lots of Hollywood and whose stories of conscience — 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, The Verdict, Network — became modern American film classics, died Saturday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 86." Robert Berkvist in the New York Times: "'While the goal of all movies is to entertain,' Mr Lumet once wrote, 'the kind of film in which I believe goes one step further. It compels the spectator to examine one facet or another of his own conscience. It stimulates thought and sets the mental juices flowing.' Social issues set his own mental juices flowing, and his best films not only probed the consequences of prejudice, corruption and betrayal but also celebrated individual acts of courage."

"Nearly all the characters in Lumet's gallery are driven by obsessions or passions that range from the pursuit of justice,...

Chicago – Get on your dancing shoes before you hit the floor for the latest version of the toe-tapping Blu-Ray Round-Up, a special edition with three beloved flicks from the ’70s and ’80s with musical beats.

Only one (“Grease”) may be an actual musical, but people still remember the great soundtrack from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “Saturday Night Fever” was all about The Bee Gees. All three titles were released on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009.

“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”

Photo credit: Paramount Synopsis: “Ferris Bueller. Larger than life. Blessed with a magical sense of serendipity. He’s a model for all those who take themselves too seriously. A guy who knows the value of a day off. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off chronicles the events in the day of a rather magical young man, Ferris (Mathew Broderick).

One spring day, toward the end of his senior year, Ferris gives...