Grease at 40: A first-time look at a pop cul­ture classic

We all have our blind spots when it comes to cin­e­ma – and that’s a good thing. Being pas­sion­ate about film is being open to dis­cov­ery and con­stant­ly look­ing to fill in gaps in one’s knowl­edge. But when you get to a cer­tain age and also hap­pen to work in film jour­nal­ism, not hav­ing seen cer­tain pop cul­ture touch­stones starts to stick out. Until very recent­ly, my biggest blind spot – at least in terms of a film it seemed every­one had seen at least once – was Grease.

And yet, through cul­tur­al osmo­sis, I’ve always felt like I have seen Grease. Not only did I know most of the songs, I knew most of the words to most of the songs. What I didn’t know was what a pecu­liar musi­cal it is. Take the title track, for instance, which plays over the open­ing cred­its and is one of the few songs I hadn’t heard before. One of four orig­i­nal songs writ­ten for the film (this one by Bar­ry Gibb), the dis­co num­ber feels sur­pris­ing­ly at odds with the late-’50s/early ​‘60s style of the rest of the sound­track. It’s a catchy tune, but seems as though it’s been includ­ed mere­ly to forge a con­nec­tion between the film and star John Travolta’s ear­li­er Bee Gees-scored hit, Sat­ur­day Night Fever. It’s a curi­ous iden­ti­ty cri­sis moment, but then per­haps it’s appro­pri­ate giv­en the nar­ra­tive arcs of the film’s lead­ing pair.

It’s hard­ly a rev­e­la­tion to sug­gest that the res­o­lu­tion for Olivia Newton-John’s Sandy is prob­lem­at­ic. I’d seen the Grease Megamix music video enough times as a kid to know what was com­ing, and I also know plen­ty of fans who object to the makeover plot turn yet still go wild for ​‘You’re the One That I Want’. It’s a stand­out tune from the film’s reper­toire, but on screen it’s a bit flat. Part of that is down to the makeover itself, but it’s also due to a recur­ring issue with direc­tor Ran­dal Kleiser’s stag­ing. His cam­era nev­er seems to be in quite the right place to flat­ter those in the cast who can actu­al­ly dance, often high­light­ing the sup­port­ing play­ers or extras that can’t instead. ​‘Greased Light­nin’ is just about the only song that bucks this trend.

It’s puz­zling just how lit­tle of the film’s struc­ture makes sense. Like why Rizzo’s preg­nan­cy scare sub­plot exists at all when it’s resolved with such non­cha­lance. Or why an entire school year appears to pass in a few months at most (mak­ing the preg­nan­cy sub­plot even more baf­fling, con­sid­er­ing the sex­u­al encounter in ques­tion sup­pos­ed­ly hap­pens at the start of the school year only for the false alarm to be revealed in the sum­mer). Also, there’s an odd throw­away plot point with the school prin­ci­pal appar­ent­ly send­ing a pho­to of some teenagers’ bare ars­es to the FBI to iden­ti­fy the cul­prits in a moon­ing inci­dent at a school dance. A Fed­er­al Booty Inves­ti­ga­tion, if you will.

Aside from try­ing to guess just how old every ​‘teenag­er’ actu­al­ly is with­out googling it, the most inter­est­ing ele­ment of watch­ing Grease today relates to the film as a mul­ti-lay­ered prod­uct of nos­tal­gia. The orig­i­nal 1971 stage musi­cal by Jim Jacobs and War­ren Casey has been described, at least by Jacobs, as a sub­ver­sion of a cer­tain kind of ​’50s cin­e­ma; a teen movie with more raunch than was typ­i­cal­ly per­mit­ted at the time, albeit still fair­ly sanitised.

When the film adap­ta­tion arrived in 1978, stu­dios had already begun cash­ing in on the public’s col­lec­tive nos­tal­gia for late ​’50s and ear­ly ​’60s Amer­i­can cul­ture, with George Lucas’ Amer­i­can Graf­fi­ti and the Hap­py Days TV sit­com prov­ing espe­cial­ly pop­u­lar. As such, Grease can be viewed as a prod­uct of its own era’s nos­tal­gia for anoth­er one; it even fea­tures stars from a pre­vi­ous era, such as for­mer teen idol Frankie Aval­on, in sup­port­ing roles.

Forty years on, Grease is still held up by many as a superla­tive exam­ple of main­stream ​’70s film­mak­ing. What I found most sur­pris­ing about it as a new­com­er was the extent to which it flirts with risqué sub­ject mat­ter. Con­sid­er­ing its sta­tus as a fam­i­ly favourite, I assumed that Sandy sud­den­ly tak­ing up smok­ing at the end of the film might be as scan­dalous as things got. Evi­dent­ly, I must have missed the fact that the line about Kenickie’s car being a ​“pussy wag­on” made it into ​‘The Grease Megamix’ (although the brag of ​“get­ting lots of tit” was appar­ent­ly deemed too hot to be retained).

I’m con­flict­ed about the over­all expe­ri­ence. The film’s sec­ond hour drags; so many sub­plots that are set up don’t get paid off, and many of the musi­cal num­bers sim­ply don’t hold up – the less said about ​‘Beau­ty School Dropout’ the bet­ter. But Grease con­tains so many mem­o­rable songs, and Tra­vol­ta is such a mag­net­ic pres­ence that I under­stand its endur­ing appeal, even if I don’t feel the love.