The Ponty film reviews continue this week, closing out a year of excellent film reviews.  We’ve laughed.  We’ve cried.  We’ve danced.

Today’s review from Ponty features a film that’ll have you doing all three.  It’s definitely one of the “modern” classics, even though the flick is nearly forty-years old at this point.  It features so many iconic scenes, it makes you wonder why Jennifer Grey ever got that nose job.

With that, here is Ponty’s review of 1987’s Dirty Dancing:

In 8 days time (or however long it takes for this piece to wing its way to Tyler’s mailbox and then onto the site), it’ll be Christmas Day [oops—that was last week—TPP]. I said to Tina, as we were putting up the decorations the other day – or to be accurate, when she was putting up the decorations and I was instructed like the good little soldier – that it doesn’t seem like 2 minutes since we took the decorations down in preparation for what turned out to be a pretty dismal year.

Anyway, the decorations are up and we are ready for the festivities of the season, which will include games, presents and some awful TV. Because, let’s face it, we’re not going to be presented with anything we don’t know about. We’re not living in 1980, the alien world that existed before the Internet and streaming, where the best you could hope for was plonking yourself down on Christmas Day to a choice of 3 channels, or a video if you were lucky, ready to watch a film that you never got the opportunity to see when it was on at the cinema. Ah, those were the days. Today, you have near infinite choice and most of it is Hobson’s; either a crap blockbuster that’s played every year; the new diversity blockbuster that all the critics are raving about but which teaches you every message but the Christmas one; or some poorly put together Hallmark type Yuletide flick, where the acting, script, direction is so bad, charades is preferable.

However, the season also offers the odd guilty pleasure. Everyone has one. When you’re with your friends or family discussing film, you always want to come across as high brow, naming your top list of intellectual titles – Dr. Zhivago, The English Patient, Lawrence of Arabia – rather than admitting, sheepishly, that all you want to do at Christmas is curl up to Ghostbusters, When Harry Met Sally or Gremlins. I might have been like that at one point but since I entered the state of not giving a crap what anyone thinks of me, guilty pleasures are no longer guilty. I like what I like and so what if that doesn’t meet with anyone’s approval. Yes, I’m talking to you, imaginery person I just made up to argue with! I don’t care!

Back in reality, if I was one of those weird, insecure types, I probably wouldn’t admit my love for Dirty Dancing (1987), a musical romance I was practically brought up on. My mum watched this movie as often as our local priest read the Bible. My brother, who could put Groundhog Day (1993) on mute and recite the entire script (except maybe the French poetry), could probably also mimic a good amount of Dirty Dancing, as could I. In terms of early life pedagogy, my brother and I should have reached our teens as either precocious darlings looking for fun in all the wrong places or as semi-hardened rockers with a penchant for 50s tunes and an attitude that would make the ladies purr. If anything, we should have turned out decent dancers!

That was not to be, however. I don’t know about my brother but I still harbour a love for this movie and play it every so often, like at Christmas. If you haven’t watched this movie, then I can only imagine you were raised in the outback by dingos and if you have watched this film and didn’t like it, then you have no soul. You’re empty like the proverbial vase. My advice? Read my review, get some flowers into that vase and shake your body like a paint mixer, as Johnny and Baby take you for the dance of your lives!

Summer, 1963. The Housemans take their holidays at an upscale domestic resort. It’s like Butlins but for the richer types. There’s all sorts of entertainment – sports, games, cabaret, magic, but it’s the music that entices Frances ‘Baby’ Houseman (Jennifer Grey), the Houseman’s youngest daughter, who takes an interest after seeing the cool dance instructor, Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze), getting dressed down by the resort’s owner about not getting busy with the ladies. While exploring one night, she finds Johnny’s cousin Billy (Neal Jones) struggling to carry watermelons and offers her help as he takes her into the seedier side of the resort, where the working class dancers go to let their hair down. She finds out that one of the resort’s key dancers, Penny (Cynthia Rhodes), has been knocked up by one of the snooty, Harvard-bound waiters, and is unable to fulfil her role as dancer, so Billy suggests that Baby can fill in for her. What follows is a journey of exploration as Baby discovers the joys of love and life while, for the first time in her sheltered existence, observing that her future needn’t be the one that makes her shine in her father’s eyes.

Class wars and pregnancies aside, this is an incredibly fun movie. It has a superb soundtrack which, incidentally, I still sing to when I’m pottering about the house, and the dancing, dirty or otherwise, is a joy to watch. Jennifer Grey is superb as Baby, her coming of age trials into love and the realities of life absolutely believable; and Swayze is just cool personified, his confident visage undented by his own troubles or by the experiences he shares with Baby, love being as new to him as it is to her. The supporting cast pay their dues, each providing a great backdrop to the main story; some laughs, heartbreak and either a shoulder to cry on or an ear to lend.

That said, Cynthia Rhodes makes a great turn as the impregnated Penny, highlighting the pain of a young woman who knows that she’s, well, up somewhere without a paddle and Max Cantor has that smug, preppie look about him that accentuates the a-hole that Robbie truly is. When he gets the arse kicking he deserves partway through the movie, you’re cheering for Johnny. The relationship between Baby and her father, Jake (Jerry Orbach), moves from sweet to strained, as the decisions she makes cause a temporary detachment; but I must give a special mention to Baby’s sister, Lisa (Jane Brucker), who is also screwed over by the womanising Robbie (though not as badly as Penny). She involves herself in most of the resort’s activities, even volunteering for the end-of-stay performance. Her take on the song “Hula Hana” remains to this day one of the most bizarre renditions I’ve ever heard – the girl couldn’t hold a note if her life depended on it – but it’s strangely hypnotic. It’s another tune I’ve sung to myself even if, to quote a line from Frasier, I couldn’t hit some of those notes without a pole vault.

While Baby’s coming of age story represents the story’s jolt from adolescence to adulthood, Lisa, despite her own issues, provides the optimism. As much as a go-getter as her sister without the torment of worrying about the things she can’t control. As sisters go, the dynamics work, in my opinion.

And as far as resolutions go, the film’s ending is brilliant, wrapped up in a delightful bow provided by Jennifer Warnes and Bill Medley. Johnny crashes the party, uttering that immortal line – ‘I say, this music is positively atrocious. William, turn off those ghastly sounds and let’s get some life into this place!’ Actually, we all know what the line is but I get a kick out of imagining how it would have been had Johnny Castle been played by an upper class English gent. ‘Nobody puts Baby in a corner!’ Swayze barks, before pulling Baby on stage and delighting the audience with a performance like no other. I still get chills when Johnny’s choreographed dance troupe march towards the stage, Baby waiting to leap off to perform a move she couldn’t master in training. (from 2:54 onwards in the clip below)

So when I’ve bored myself into a stupor with all the badly acted Hallmark movies, I’ll pop this on again and nod my head, sing, badly, to “Big Girl’s Don’t Cry” and remember a time when this was the only movie I could recall but with fondness.