I'm not so naive as to believe that SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER is the only movie that's ever been butchered for television viewing, but I'm also confident enough to declare that few have ever been butchered this badly. This is not a television print with the profanity overdubbed; on television, FEVER is nearly ten minutes shorter, with large important pieces of the movie removed, including a great deal of the characters' racism and sexism and, therefore, their complexity (For all his looks and charms, Travolta's Tony Manero in this SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER is basically just a really likable asshole).

As a result of the television cuts, FEVER isn't just a tamer movie, it's also a drastically weaker one that's basically only worth watching for the fifteen minutes of Travolta's remarkable dancing. On DVD, FEVER puts the dancing sequences in their intended context, surrounded by a world of darkness. In proper form, SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER seems to harken back to the musicals of the Depression like GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933, where people came together on the stage to triumph over economic failures through dance.

Based on an unremarkable article from New York magazine entitled "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night," SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER is the story of a couple of weeks in the lives of a bunch of Italian kids in Brooklyn. Travolta's Tony is their Darwinian leader - he's the best looking and the best dancer and the best fighter. He rules the 2001 Odyssey disco, where he practically has to fight the women off with a stick (one begs for the chance to simply wipe his sweaty brow). The rest of the week Tony has a dead-end job in a paint store, and spends his nights quarreling with his overbearing mother and unemployed father (played with ethnic perfection by Julie Bovasso and Sam Coppola).

The nice thing about Travolta's dancing is that as impressive as he is in his solo number (performed to "You Should Be Dancing," one of six Bee Gees tracks on FEVER's soundtrack), he is not perfect. Somehow Travolta and his dance teachers managed to convincingly create the picture of a guy who is a good enough dancer to become the star of a tiny club in Brooklyn but still awkward enough at points to suggest that he's totally self-taught and not a professional.

Tony's practicing these moves in preparation for 2001's upcoming dance contest, and decides to team up with a girl he spies there one Saturday night named Stephanie, whose job as a secretary over the bridge in Manhattan excites Tony. Stephanie is played by an actress named Karen Lynn Gorney, whose sole credit of note is in this picture. I used to believe Gorney was FEVER's one significant weakness; she's not a great actress, and she's certainly not as good a dancer as the character requires her to be. But in another way, it’s possible that Tony’s attraction to Stephanie blinds him to the truth. He thinks she's a sexy chick who escaped his Brooklyn neighborhood, so he cannot see her sub par dancing. Later, we learn that Stephanie has made it in Manhattan by -- at least in part -- sleeping with someone in her office, which has the opposite effect on Tony (probably because this seems exactly like something one of the girls from his neighborhood would do to secure financial security).

The Bee Gee's music in the film, most of which was written specifically for the project, are unqualified masterpieces (hopefully we're well beyond the point where we have to maintain the irrational posture that all disco sucks). Everyone knows the opening credits, where Travolta walks a cocky strut in sync with "Stayin' Alive" but few remember that the song is used again later in the film, in the moments immediately after the climactic contest at 2001, when Tony is at his lowest point; moments later one of his friends will be dead. "Stayin' Alive" indeed.

The songs have seemingly simple messages, and on the "Behind The Music" that's included on FEVER's DVD everyone insists that the songs brilliantly propel the story, but they're actually placed in the film by director John Badham in ways that turn them into ironic comments on the action. The romantic "How Deep Is Your Love" comes while Tony wanders the subway system, lost and distraught, and then again after he has agreed with Stephanie to become friends, not lovers.