Dirty Dancing Review

"Dirty Dancing (20th Anniversary)" reviews

Movie

Dirty Dancing (20th Anniversary)

Author

anonymous

Date reviewed

2007-02-02 16:00:50

Provider

Review

Patrick Swayze may be a figure of fun these days but back in the hairstyle-challenged days of the mid-80s, he was, purely on the back of Dirty Dancing, the don of every suburban discotheque. Predictably, the film having been transformed into a West End musical, Dirty Dancing has been re-released and still succeeds in being markedly less corny than a film of this type has any right to be.

Swayze plays working-class dance instructor Johnny Castle, a ballerina trapped inside the body of a plumber, who becomes romantically involved with Frances 'Baby' Houseman (Jennifer Grey), a 17-year-old Daddy's girl who's on holiday with her family. Castle is, at first, hostile to the new girl, believing her to be not only pampered but inept. Slowly, though, her awkwardness becomes less pronounced, to the chagrin of Baby's father who is offended by her burgeoning independence and her involvement with a man whom he regards as her inferior.

This, after all, is the pre-Beatles Sixties (as evidenced by the note-perfect soundtrack which hints, enticingly, at the joys that are to come) when the staff at the camp where the film is set are obliged to live in quarters out of bounds to guests. For Johnny, though, hitherto destined for a life as a painter of other people's houses, Baby's presence forces him to expand his choices, while she, too, is freed from her family's constraints.

Look beyond the Eighties trappings and Patrick Swayze's hair, and Dirty Dancing proves, much like the similarly-minded Rocky, that dreams occasionally really do come true.