Cinema - Dirty Dancing

Some films have durability, others don’t. 1987 saw the release of such classics as Babette’s Feast, Wings of Desire, Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown and Full Metal Jacket. You can still get these films on DVD, but you’d be hard-pushed to find them anywhere in the world on the big-screen. That year also saw the release of a low-budget piece of clichéd silliness, which went on to become a worldwide smash, and has become a cult classic for every generation of teenage girls since. And so, at a cinema near you, we have the return of… Dirty Dancing.

It’s not difficult to see the appeal of the movie, set in an middle class holiday resort in 1963, but very much a product of the 80s, big hair-do’s and all. Jennifer Grey plays Baby Houseman, a plain Jane of a teenager who falls in love with the hotel dance instructor Johnny (Patrick Swayze), all big muscles and you-lookin’-at-me working class attitude. They have a lot to teach each other: he gets an injection of New Man sensitivity, she learns how to twist her hips like a Havana showgirl, in his bed and on the dance floor. Her father, of course, doesn’t agree with the match, which leads to a confrontation between the two men in her life, and the classic line, a catch-phrase to a generation, ‘Nobody puts Baby in the Corner’. Dirty Dancing, which climaxes with a to-die-for dance scene, is the king of the so-bad-it’s-good genre of films: expect a 90% female audience, reliving the time of their lives. DL