Grease (1978)
Directed by Randal Kleiser
Australian good girl Sandy and greaser Danny fell in love over the summer. But when they unexpectedly discover they're now in the same high school, will they be able to rekindle their romance despite their eccentric friends?
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14 films that influenced Grease
What critics say influenced Grease
It had only been 20 years since all of that was real when they were making "Happy Days" and "American Graffiti" and this and everything else that romanticized the era when the filmmakers who suddenly owned pop culture had been kids.
It lacks anything resembling the intelligence of "American Graffiti," the good fun of "FM" or the integrity of "The Buddy Holly Story."
It is tempting to the point that I cannot ignore it to compare the film with American Graffiti , for they serve to bracket a certain important period in the American cinema: the 1973 film was released in the most glorious peak of the New Hollywood, while 1978 finds us in the first year of that movement's symbolic death (about which we'll have a great deal to say later).
Grease is like American Graffiti in its bridging of the generation gap through a Top 40s score and a plot that plays up the naivete of a more innocent era (which was still considered plenty dangerous by its elders, who were scandalized by Elvis the Pelvis).
Old timers will remember Eve Arden as everyone's favorite high school teacher (from radio and the big screen) in "Our Miss Brooks."
Eve Arden, of "Our Miss Brooks," is Principal McGee.
"Grease" is primarily a nostalgic, romanticized, fanaticized tribute to the 1950s, a gentle spoofing of the era, with a little parody of "West Side Story" along the way.
It's kind of West Side Story with different music and a happy ending.
While his trickiness reminded me of Sandrich — as when he intercuts Travolta and Newton-John duetting on “Summer Dreams,” but to two separate groups of listeners — his exuberant camera moves have all the panache and style of Stanley Donen at his very best (as in The Pajama Game.
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"Grease" isn't a great film, and it certainly is not in the same league as "Singin' in the Rain", "The Sound of Music", or even "Evita".
Right out of the gate, Kleiser humorously appends the 1955 Oscar-winning song "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing" to a love montage with a beach setting that evokes 1953's From Here to Eternity.
"Grease" isn't a great film, and it certainly is not in the same league as "Singin' in the Rain", "The Sound of Music", or even "Evita".
Plot isn’t exactly what Grease is all about: In fact, it’s really just an updating of that 1928 musical, Good News (as if directed by that forgotten regisseur of the ‘30s, Mark Sandrich).
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The film re-creates a 1950s that exists mostly in idyllic memory (for an alternative version, see "Rebel Without a Cause'').
Randal Kleiser's film version of the Broadway musical is enjoying a 20th-anniversary re-release from Paramount, with Danny (John Travolta), Sandy (Olivia Newton-John), Rizzo (Stockard Channing), and the rest of the gang at Rydell High (Bobby, not Mark) hotter than ever, even as they make Fast Times at Ridgemont High look like Rebel Without a Cause.
After success in TV's "Welcome Back, Kotter," a supporting role in "Carrie," and a starring role in a TV movie, "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble," John Travolta hit the really big time with "Saturday Night Fever" (1977) and "Grease" (1978) back to back.