Livvy Gets the Travolta Experience
“LOOK at me - I’m Sandra Dee, Lousy with virginity!”
And that’s the theme of “Grease” which opens in Glasgow - and all over the place — this weekend, starring John Travolta as the greasy one (it’s the hair, man, quick flicks of the comb through whatever Yanks use for Brylcreem) and Olivia Newton-John, all ponytails and petticoats.
It’s look back at the days of pyjama-parties and wishful thinking, dirnd1 skirts and white socks with black suede shoes — the Fifties.
I’ve heard them called the Fabulous Fifties, but for the life of me I can’t remember why they were. I must have missed something, probably all those High School dances and end-of term baseball games.
Like most folk I know, I got them second-hand through some of the most awful movies it has ever been my misfortune to see, and the one real complaint I have about “Grease” is that it’s so careful a mickey-take of those Sandra Dee films that at times it manages to achieve their stultifying boredom.
“Grease” however, has all the advantages of a big budget and star names to gel over that (and also a marvellous sound system which puts the top-class hit tunes over with crystal clarity).
The plot is the old, old story: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl on a background of High School Prom and end-term big game.
Where “Grease” differs is that in the old days the heroes and their heroines were the clean-cut team types. This time they’re the black leather-jacketed drop-outs. And where Sandra Dee would have converted her man into a sweatered athletic oaf, John Travolta turns Miss Pony Tail into a slick chick with a strong line in dated dialogue starting with “See you later, alligator” and deteriorating from there.
Not that there aren’t a lot of funny lines in the film - Stockard Channing, as a snazzy piece of goods too early for her time delivers a lot of them, such as “True love and he didn’t lay a hand on you? Sounds like a creep to me!”
Obviously “Grease” is going to be a big hit - the advance record sales show that already. As a send-up of the period, well, it could have been funnier.
As I said, the story is type-cast and so, to a great extent, is John Travolta who plays a rather bloodless version of the street-kid he portrayed in “Saturday Night Fever.”
But - and it’s good to see it - Travolta reveals a marvellous comic talent which is going to stand him in good stead when he gets too old for his tough-teenager face.
In fact, the film really comes alive during one sequence where he decides to join the Jockstraps - the athletes - to impress Miss Pony Tail and makes a hash of it all in a manner so reminiscent of Jerry Lewis at his comic height that it’s difficult to tell whether or not these are Travolta’s own mannerisms or an extremely skilful take-off of Lewis.