Dirty Dancing was written out of Eleanor Bergstein’s own childhood, spent two years in development limbo at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and was finally made by Vestron Pictures on location in Lake Lure, North Carolina and Mountain Lake, Virginia. It premiered at Cannes on May 12, 1987 and opened in the United States on August 21. None of that history suggests a phenomenon. The film became one anyway, and watching it again it is clear why.
Trailer, via Lionsgate Movies.
Baby and Johnny
Frances “Baby” Houseman, played by Jennifer Grey, is 17 and expecting a tedious summer at a Borscht Belt resort with her family in 1963. Instead she falls for Johnny Castle, the resort’s dance instructor, played by Patrick Swayze, and finds herself filling in as his partner. That is the plot. It is 100 minutes long, and it does not need more.
Grey plays Baby as smart and unformed, which is the right combination. Swayze plays Johnny as a man who is better than his station and knows it, and the chemistry between them is real enough to carry scenes the script does not.
The Adults
Jerry Orbach is Baby’s father Jake, and the film’s most honest thread is the one between them. He is a decent man whose decency has limits he has never had to look at. Kelly Bishop plays her mother, Jane Brucker her sister Lisa, and Jack Weston plays Max Kellerman, who owns the resort and runs it the way a resort in 1963 was run. Cynthia Rhodes, as Penny, gets the film’s hardest material and plays it without melodrama.
The Dancing
Kenny Ortega’s choreography is the reason the film exists, and Emile Ardolino shoots it with a patience that lets the numbers breathe. John Morris composed the score. The dance scenes are the film’s argument: that a body can say things a script cannot, and that the class line between Baby and Johnny is crossed on a dance floor before it is crossed anywhere else.
Where It Falls Short
Outside the dancing, the film is thin. The class conflict is announced more than explored, the villainy is broad, and the dialogue leans on lines that were written to be quoted. The romance runs on a schedule. Every beat arrives when a romance beat is supposed to arrive, and the film never surprises you once you have seen the trailer.
It is also very much of its moment. The 1963 setting is a costume more than a world, and the film’s ideas about that year are the ideas of 1987.
Why It Lasted
Because the feeling is genuine. Bergstein wrote about something she knew, and that knowledge survives the formula around it. The tagline promises first dance, first love and the time of your life, and the film delivers the first two well enough that audiences have forgiven it the third for decades.
The Verdict
Dirty Dancing is a modest, well-danced romance that a generation turned into a ritual. The ritual is bigger than the film. The film is still worth an evening.
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