By Joan Baum
1963 — not the best of times, not the worst — writer Eleanor Bergstein caught it on the cusp of change when, almost 40 years ago, she scripted and co-produced “Dirty Dancing,” a screenplay based partly on her own experience at a Catskills resort. It became one of the most captivating movies ever made about that time — before assassinations, dangerous drugs, punk, AIDS, Woodstock, Vietnam.
The heroine of “Dirty Dancing,” Frances “Baby” Houseman, the sweet, innocent, compliant daughter of a doctor, is intent on helping the world by way of the Peace Corps, then college. These are her last weeks before she leaves, and she’s not thrilled about spending time with her parents and sister at a vacation hotel in upstate New York, but she goes along because she loves her family.
The fictional resort, Kellerman’s, caters to well-off city folk who enjoy being with a familiar ethnic crowd, mainly Jewish.
Curious about how the other half lives, Baby drifts off one night to an area restricted to staff, where she observes the employees dancing. It’s a racially mixed crowd, young, talented, jubilant. They’re not doing the fox trot but something loose, full of pulsing sensuality — at the center of which is Johnny Castle, the resort’s handsome, popular dance instructor.
Several years older than Baby and a magnetic personality, though clearly working class and apparently not Jewish, he sees her watching with awe and lures her onto the dance floor. Confused, embarrassed at first, she finally leans into the music, and him. It’s as though he’s courting her with his eyes.
The scene is full of energy, high spirits, happiness — so different from the drug-infused, sexually indiscriminate, strobe-lit body grinding that defined so much of the late 1970s. The music is infectious.
The commercial success of “Dirty Dancing,” along with growing critical acclaim, was a surprise to those who had invested $4.5 million, found themselves dropped by MGM, but still hoped that with an unknown company they would have a hit with the teenage crowd.
They were wrong. The kids passed — they were already into The Beatles and hard rock — but their parents and their contemporaries did not pass, and the film, on its way to becoming a cult classic with an older generation, made box office history, pulling in $214 million.
That was from the movie alone, not to mention the sell-out stage adaptations, sequels, prequels and TV series. It premiered in May 1987 in Cannes, in the United States in August, effecting with “Saturday Night Fever” a new genre of dance competitions.
“Dirty Dancing” is more than a fabulously choreographed demonstration of the popularity of Latino-influenced dance music, however. It’s also an engaging romance about coming-of-age first love, and incidentally pays sentimental homage to what would soon be the dying Catskills.
But it’s the dancing that does it. It’s seductive, the acting superb — with Joffrey Ballet dancer Patrick Swayze in the role of Johnny Castle, and Jennifer Grey (Joel Grey’s daughter) as his young protégé. There are even brief cameo moments, including Cousin Brucie, Matthew Broderick and Honey Coles, dancing with Jack Weston, the owner of Kellerman’s.
The concluding scene, which rouses the entire summer crowd of visitors, workers and owners in dance and song, is blissful, with a conclusion that is cleverly ambiguous about whether Baby and Johnny will stay together.
And then there is this: “Dirty Dancing” includes a topic not likely to be accepted today by traditional media: abortion.
Pressured to take it out, Bergstein has said in interviews that she refused. Of course, she’s writing the script after the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973 — but looking back a decade (and maybe, now, looking toward the future).
It’s significant that the movie deals with abortion realistically (a back- alley hack) and without judgment. Indeed, Baby’s father, whom she gets to help Johnny’s professional dance partner Penny (Cynthia Rhodes), is appalled only because he mistakenly believes that Johnny was the father.
Finally, there’s that title: “Dirty” Dancing, resonant of a time when premarital or extramarital intercourse was widely assumed to be immoral, and when sex was not typically associated with affection, humor or love. What’s really “dirty,” the movie suggests, is hypocrisy, failure of humanity, lack of responsibility, and, by implication, innocence untested, virtue unearned, the absence of joy.
Joan Baum, a resident of Springs, is a retired professor of English at CUNY and reviews books for WSHU, the Connecticut NPR station.
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