Grease

Annotation for KRRR! 2022 by Jaroslav Cibulka

The story of Grease, an adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same name, is essentially very simple: a boy wins a girl and then loses her, only to eventually win her back. A similar schematic is welcome in musicals, as it offers enough space for the singing and dancing numbers to stand out, and Grease is no exception in this regard. The mostly rock and roll and pop songs are transferred to the screen with choreographic imagination and playfulness, and the environments and costumes are resplendent with a colorful palette of saturated colors. He (John Travolta) is a high school flunky with a greasy hair named Danny, and she (Olivia Newton-John) is a fragile blonde named Sandy. In one scene early in the film, Danny is sitting in the stands of the school stadium, Sandy is sitting on a bench outside. Both of them sing to their inquisitive classmates with pleasant smiles about the summer they spent together. The cheerful and catchy song is full of witty contradictions and overt sexual innuendo. However, the tone soon changes to a melancholic dreamy one, and the summer lovers meet in a double exposure: “Oh, those summer nights!” Along with films like The Last Show (1971), American Graffiti (1973) and The Backwoods (1973), director Randal Kleiser’s film belongs to a loose cycle of American films that in the 1970s drew inspiration from the 1950s. The wicked could simply label Grease as a stubborn mythologizing of this decade, which was overly exploited by pop culture, led by nostalgia for the harmonious middle-class family, Elvis, milk bars, drive-ins and the first televisions. Rydell High School is attended by stereotypical nerds, nerds, jocks and backward teachers. Danny himself is part of the “greaser” subculture, from which the film’s title is ultimately derived.

However, Grease does not worship or blindly embalm the 1950s, as it consistently blurs the line between quoting and irony. The model-likeness of the characters and situations is taken to the extreme with mischievous expressions and theatrical movements. Grease cannot be taken completely seriously, and neither does it. We see this, for example, in the scene of Danny’s basketball practice, which is preceded by the careful combing of his greased hair, a favorite leitmotif of the film. Grease also makes the passionate and passionately demonstrated sexuality of its characters, often hiding sincere emotions, ambiguous.

At least one scene is downright “horny”. That is when Olivia Newton-John puts on tight leather pants, which, to put it mildly, arouses a series of not very controlled physiological reactions in John Travolta. And who can say that they have seen something like this on a 70mm cinema screen?