With great reluctance, on this, the occasion of its twentieth anniversary and reissue, I am forced to champion Dirty Dancing on behalf of my gender. Nobody, after all, puts Baby in a corner. As poll-fiends and point scoring misogynists may remember, this most enduring chick-flick has topped countless Women’s Favourite Film polls and amassed $515 million in receipts. It has spawned a non-linear sequel (Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights) and a hit stage musical. When the Berlin Wall came down, the kids from the eastern side adopted Dirty Dancing t-shirts as their uniform of liberation. Most depressingly for detractors, the film, “a Star Wars for girls,” has stubbornly refused to go away. Literally. It can frequently be found in off-licences teamed with a bucket of Maltesers and a bottle of Baileys in a handy boxed set. Like, party on.
Should we regard this success as a by product of irony or a subversive deviation from canonical tastes? Gosh, I hope so. Either way, there’s a generic distillation at work in Eleanor Bergstein’s screenplay that’s hard to entirely resist. Johnny (Patrick Swayze) and Baby (Jennifer Grey) are endearingly star-crossed lovers, a Pyramus and Thisbe with classic eighties hair (Jennifer’s is shaggy, Patrick sports a near mullet). She’s vacationing at a swish resort with her wealthy Jewish family in the summer of 1963. He’s the yellow-coat dance instructor. She’s a feminist who wants to join the Peace Corps and, it is implied despite evidence to the contrary, an ugly duckling. He’s a bad boy with pioneering Latin dance moves. They get together and provide the soundtrack to a thousand wedding receptions.
Despite the cheese, the film is less simpering than the uninitiated might suppose. A compellingly soapy plot takes in a backstreet abortion, spurned women and class struggle. Hell, it’s the dance movie Marx might have made if the gushing highly charged denouement (set to Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes performing ‘(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life’) wasn’t quite so bourgeois.