Dog Days of Summer Movies: Dirty Dancing
by Tara Ariano
Dirty Dancing might be the first dance movie I ever really loved. I was thirteen when it came out, and my worry in revisiting it at the age of thirty-six was that it would feel corny and dated. I’m happy to report that it is still delightful.
The story is in your DNA: Baby Houseman (Jennifer Grey) travels to Kellerman’s holiday camp, in the Catskills, for the last three weeks of the summer of 1963. There, she becomes immediately enraptured by dance instructor Johnny (Patrick Swayze), and though he’s initially prejudiced against her because he’s working-class and she’s a swell, they fall in love (duh).
Dirty Dancing would have hooked me if it were just the early ’60s version of every dance movie: a guy and a girl from different walks of life meet, and find not only that all their differences are erased through dance BUT that dancing helps one or both of them to believe in themselves and also by the way dancing is super-hot sublimated sex (probably hotter than any actual sex scenes that eventually occur).
But the benefit of watching it again as an adult is that you appreciate that the movie is smarter — better — than it needs to be. For instance:
- Johnny and Baby initially get together not on some flimsy, forgettable pretext but because his usual partner, the gorgeous Penny (Cynthia Rhodes), has gotten pregnant, and the only time she can get an appointment with an illegal abortionist is the same night she and Johnny are scheduled to dance at a neighbouring hotel. Social realism!
- The hotel owner, Max (Jack Weston), encourages his employees to flirt with the guests, “even the dogs.” Sexual politics before The Pill!
- The staff is made up of t-shirt-wearing manual labourers (the ones who get down in the staff quarters) and crisply uniformed waiters (Jewish boys saving money for Yale). Class divisions!
- Kellerman grandson Neil (Lonny Price) assumes Baby’s going to Mount Holyoke to study English, but she’s pursuing Economics Of Underdeveloped Countries and wants to join the Peace Corps. Proto-feminism!
I had also forgotten how successful the film is in portraying the relationship between Baby and her father Jake (the great Jerry Orbach). It’s clear that a lot of her do-gooding pre-hippie ideas come from him; they have a nice moment early on, tag-teaming Baby’s simpering sister Lisa (Jane Brucker) by comparing her whining over not having brought enough shoes to real (period) tragedies, like police dogs in Birmingham or self-immolating monks. When Penny’s abortion inevitably goes awry and Baby enlists Jake, a doctor, to save her, Jake asks “who’s responsible” for Penny, and Johnny steps forward. He is responsible, in the most meaningful sense of the word, having been friends with her since they were kids and…you know, actually caring whether she lives or dies. Jake assumes this means that Johnny is the baby’s father, but we know he’s not: that honour belongs to the Housemans’ waiter, Robbie (Max Cantor), who also has his eye on Lisa. (In a detail I had completely forgotten, when Baby presses him to pay for Penny’s abortion, he sneers, “Some people count. Some people don’t,” and tries to lend her his copy of The Fountainhead — but he needs it back, because he made notes in the margins.) Anyway, Jake thinks that Johnny knocked up Penny and then moved on to an easier mark, the naïve, inexperienced Baby. When Jake forbids Baby from seeing Johnny or any of the other “bad” kids (I mean, the girls have bra straps falling down their shoulders, need I say more), Baby obviously disobeys him, but not without qualms. It’s clear that the schism caused by her sexual/dance awakening (same thing) causes pain for both father and daughter.
But the dancing…oh, the dancing. Kenny Ortega’s choreography is still so sexy, and director Emile Ardolino stages the performance scenes with care to let the audience see what’s going on — which sounds like an obvious thing for the director of a musical to do, but which is something Rob Marshall (Chicago) obviously didn’t feel he needed to learn. Swayze and Grey have great chemistry, but it’s also just as great a pleasure to see him dancing with Rhodes. In fact, I was especially entranced by the dance training montage, in which Penny helps Baby learn the Sheldrake routine. Queer-theorist viewers will probably find much to unpack in the sequence where Johnny watches as the camera pulls back to show Penny’s and Baby’s legs, identical in silver strappy sandals and fishnets, mirroring each other’s movements. I just thought it was hot.
The love between a college-bound crusader and a blue-collar guy making his living dancing until he inevitably ends up in the Painters’ and Plasterers’ Union is probably doomed. We know this. But the movie ends on the jubilant scene of guests and employees mingling freely on the dance floor, in the midst of which Johnny and Baby gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes. Will their affair outlast the Housemans’ stay at Kellerman’s? The filmmakers wisely wrap things up without addressing any such practical questions, and thus the spell remains unbroken. All these years later, I still carry a watermelon for Dirty Dancing.
Summer Timeline: The Housemans arrive at Kellerman’s for a three-week stint, wrapping up with the close of the hotel for the season.
Enviable Vacation Locale: I can tell I’m getting old, because the idea of going to a summer camp for adults — with such geriatric activities as learning the foxtrot and trying on wigs — has a lot of appeal to me. (Servicey note: in real life, “Kellerman’s” is Mountain Lake Hotel, in Virginia. Not only is it still open, but it offers all-inclusive Dirty Dancing Weekends.)
Coming Of Age: Yeah, Baby basically becomes a woman just watching Johnny and Penny grinding their crotches together, well before she and Johnny take their dancing to the next level.
Quick-Burning Summer Romance: It definitely doesn’t take long for Baby and Johnny to get together.
Best Summer Ever?: UM YEAH WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU OBVIOUSLY IT WAS THE BEST SUMMER EVER
Unconventional Ways to Beat the Heat: Practising dance lifts in the lake!
Summer Fashions: The first dress we see Baby in is so amazingly contemporary that I wonder if it was the actual inspiration for this 2011 Tracy Reese frock. Lisa rehearses her talent show number in a pretty great pair of print shorts that wouldn’t be out of place in a J. Crew catalogue. And there’s no more classic summer look than Baby’s go-tos: cropped white jeans or cutoff jean shorts, paired with pristine white Keds.
Worth the A/C?: I’m sorry, I didn’t hear the question, because I was crying tears of joy. Is it worth seeing? Yes. It’s worth seeing.
As A Summer Movie: The way it captures the highs of summer (romance with an exciting, sexy stranger) and the lows (doing a puzzle with your dad on a rainy afternoon; the melancholy of Max Kellerman’s correct intuition, during the final talent show, that “[i]t all seems to be ending”) makes Dirty Dancing a surprisingly evocative document of how that last summer before college really feels.
Tara Ariano has lots of opinions. When she’s not bloviating on her podcast or sharing the best quotes from Hoarders on Twitter, she’s…probably asleep.
Tags: Cynthia Rhodes Dirty Dancing Dog Days of Summer Movies Emile Ardolino Jack Weston Jane Brucker Jennifer Grey Jerry Orbach Kenny Ortega Lonny Price Max Cantor movies Patrick Swayze Rob Marshall Wing Chun
For peeps who have the DVD (who doesn’t!) i’d recommend the commentary by the writer Eleanor Bergstein as it’s one of the best i’ve heard. Highlights the process, the production, the autobiographical elements and more.
I totally agree with Faye. Ever since I listened to it I’ve been on the lookout for places where the air is hung with silver.
A classic “time machine” movie. When I watch it I am eleven years old again and everything is intense and romantic and Patrick Swayze is my favorite actor again. *sigh*
THIS IS MY FAVORITE MOVIE EVER!!! I love it so much. It came out my freshman year of high school, and I went to see it with my friend Anna. My sister drove us, as she was home from college, and took her boyfriend Russell (who had undergone some sort of butt surgery and trouble sitting through it). They sat in the back (not sure if they were in the corner though). If you understand how crappy my longterm memory is, you’d be amazed that I retained this level of detail. It is only due to Dirty Dancing’s awesomeness. Plus, it was the first movie where I saw someone in my age group go “all the way”. And I still boogie to the soundtrack (gosh it is an awesome soundtrack) in my car. Whenever I wear white capris and a sleeveless shirt, I pretend that I am Baby. Fantastic movie choice!
Love this movie. Also, major props to Tara for writing a review of this gem and not making a single “baby in a corner” joke. That takes restraint.
Her editor was not so restrained on Twitter, I assure you.
LOVE.
So much to love in this movie and I blubber ever time Baby confronts her father on the dock — awwwww, Jerry Orbach, such a cool dad.
OMIGOD DIRTY DANCING I LOVE YOU 4EVA!
Seriously, this is a PeeChee movie, nay, a Writing Its Name In INK On Your Chemistry Book movie, that’s how deep my love is.
All the best movies are made up of moments, and this one is chock fulla–Baby practicing, throwing a fit, and practicing some more on the bridge, Johnny so nonchalantly breaking the window of his car when he’s locked the keys inside, Lisa gently telling Baby her hair is “prettier your way” before the final night at Kellermans, Baby’s mom telling her to stand up straight when she’s trying to get the two hundred fifty dollars from her dad, lying to him for the first time–all strung on that thread of “I was [x] years old when this came out and I’ve never forgotten…”
And I’d like to give a shout out to the actress playing Lisa. She took what could have been a straight up cliche groaner of a role and imbued it with crack, but never show-off, comic timing. Her big scene is her rehearsing her number (hilariously counting out the beats to herself before resuming her yodel), but my favorite moment is when she’s onstage with all the others during the Kellerman Finale, all crooning “Hold hands and hearts and voices…” She’s totally into it, singing and smiling away, but the the best part is when Johnny jumps up onstage for his big speech and the singers trail off. She keeps going, and going, well past when everyone else has stopped, when even Max is looking at her all “girl, are you blind or what?” I love that the most.
To many great personal memories of DIRTY DANCING, I can now add a new one:
Last year, during a visit to my Mom’s, I had brought some DVDs for her to watch and I think she was feeling a need to take control of the viewing choices a bit, so one night she said, “I have Dirty Dancing on a tape I made in the back…” and I promptly said, “Sure! Man, I haven’t seen that movie in easily 15 years,” and she helpfully said, “It has Patrick Swayze!” Which of course I knew, but it’s always really cute to me when my 80-year-old mother gushes about some actor, because she almost never does that.
So we watched the movie, and yeah, I was also surprised at the stuff I hadn’t really keyed on back the first time I saw it (I didn’t see it when it came out, and I wasn’t all that young when it did, either). Like Jerry Orbach’s amazing performance, or the nuances of the abortion subplot. It wasn’t just a really fun movie, it was a really GOOD movie.
So there we are, watching the ending with the big dance number and everything… and the tape CUT OUT right after the climactic lift pictured in the still above. It just went *BLIP* and then started playing some entirely different movie! I think we both screamed “AAUGH!” at the same moment. She’s clearly screwed up the programming when she taped it, way back when.
And the hell of it was that neither of us could quite precisely remember what came after that climactic lift! I was pretty sure there was something more, but it had been so many years since either of us had watched it that we didn’t quite know. I had to call my best friend (who has always been a huge fan of the movie) and without preamble yell into the phone “OMG TELL US HOW DIRTY DANCING ENDS!”
HollyH, I assume the friend of course answered that they “had the time of [their] li[ves].” The end.
This is a definitely a “I remember x about when I first saw…” kind of movie. I was so young, it was probably too mature for me, but I had a cool older cousin. I choregraphed all kinds of dances to the entire soundtrack. In some ways, I love the soundtrack more than the movie itself. But one of my favorite memories was a spring break trip. The beach house didn’t have cable and we played the movie on repeat the entire week.
Loved Dirty Dancing! it was one of the only movies I actually bought so I could have a copy. My kids were small. My daughter only about 4 and her brother 6. They watched that movie over and over. But one day I caught my daughter standing on the coffee table and her brother yelling for her to jump and he would catch her “just like Johnny”. Who knows how THAT would have turned out?
I’m not sure when I saw this relative to when it came out. I probably saw it first around the late eighties. i would have been 7 or 8 and my sister was 15 or 16. We watched and watched it again, then watched the last big number over and over till we could do it ourselves.
Mum and Dad still have the recorded off TV video we had and I watch it every time it’s on TV.
Last year our local cinema put it on the big screen. If you think you see things you missed the first time round watching at home. This was even better! I could finally answer the question – When Baby was in bed with Johnny, was she wearing underwear? A question that was terribly important to me when I was 8. For the record the answer is yes.
I love this movie SO much! And I love that other people love it! Awesome write-up! I was 8 years old when it came out and my mom and her two best friends went to see it and took all of us kids, much to the grumblings of our dads. (Though, I guess if it bothered them THAT much, they could have just looked after us their damn selves, right?) I remember LOVING it and running around all summer in a pink sundress with a twirly skirt that sort of (If you squinted. A lot) looked like Baby’s dress at the end of the movie.
Also, I was not a particularly sheltered kid, but the bit about Penny’s abortion? Went right over my little head. UNTIL COLLEGE. I was watching it with friends in my 20s and had a lightbulb moment all, “OH! SHE HAD AN ABORTION?!?!? HOLY SHIT!” I don’t know what I thought was going on, but an abortion never crossed my mind.
It’s such a wonderful, feminist movie. Baby is such an awesome character, the likes of which I feel we don’t ever really see again. Patrick Swayze is at his PINNACLE of hotness and charm.
Emily Gilmore plays Baby and Lisa’s mom! And if you can stand to hear this beloved movie mocked (I, um, totally can), the Riff Trax is pretty great.
I love this movie so much. I’m glad this is a space where I don’t have to defend that love!
OMG I LOVE THIS MOVIE! This movie and North and South are Patrick Swayze at his hottest. And can I say that I still get sad every time I remember that he’s gone? Sniff.
But, let me tell you…so many things I got wrong about this movie the first times I saw it! This is why:
1. I was 12.
2. I saw the movie for the first time after I moved to Germany (on tape) and I didn’t understand half the dialogue. More than half.
So I had no idea WTF happened to Penny, when she was bleeding, I thought that Robbie knifed her!Seriously hated that guy! I also totally didn’t understand the reason that Baby had to dance for Penny, other than she couldn’t make it. Not only did I NOT know what an abortion was, but there is just no way I knew the German word for it. Ahh, Dirty Dancing. The story I made up in my head to make sense of the plot was almost as fun.
This movie came out when I was a sophomore in college. My friends and I saw it, in the theater, every couple of days.
“What do you want to do tonight?”
“I got a paper and I should study for that test.”
“You wanna go see Dirty Dancing again?”
“Yeah, sure, I can study later. Let’s go.”
Seriously, I think we saw it 5 or 6 times. And there such a controversy when the soundtrack came out and “Do You Love Me (Now that I Can Dance” wasn’t on it. Seriously, the best song wasn’t included? Were they crazy? I seem to remember that the controversy was so large that they had to release a Part 2 soundtrack that included that song but I might be making that up in my head . . ?
I love DD, and Swayze in it, but in my opinion, his foxiness is at its peak in “The Outsiders.” With the skin-tight black t-shirt? Girrrrrrl.
@Sars, I concur! But he did wear that skin tight black shirt on DD too! :) And he’s barely in “The Outsiders”. Love the leather jacket and black shirt, also love the Civil War era suits he wore in North and South.
@StillAnotherKate, I had no idea there was controversy BUT you are right about the second CD because my parents have both.
I guess I’ll be the lone voice of dissent. I didn’t love it. I mean, I *liked* it, mainly for the music (I played the FOOL out of that soundtrack) and the dancing (I was a college sophomore at a Christian fundy college where dancing was banned so we DRANK IN those parts), but the love story was just. . .icky. Baby (W.T.F. is up with that name? Who calls their kid BABY?) is supposed to be 16? And Johnny is what? Supposed to be in his early 20s? Okay. That’s some statutory shit right there. It also didn’t help that PS looked like he was in his early 40s and could’ve played Jennifer Grey’s dad.
Mmm, Dirty Dancing. As Tara says: come for the summer-love-and-training-montage, stay for the surprisingly insightful social politics.
First time I saw this was in my high school dorm room. It was Finals Week, spring term, and we had a constant loop of this and the A&E Pride and Prejudice –you finished your math final, you grabbed a candy bar from the vending machine, and you flopped down to watch Baby and Johnny repressed-sexual-tension their way into a lift and celebrate the fact that you could forget about trig for three months.
@Lisa: I’m pretty sure she’s supposed to be eighteen/nineteen, if she’s going to college in the fall.
And yeah, semi-significant age difference still, but…enh. The TAs at Mount Holyoke will be even older, and still cute. ;)
You can add me to the list of people who learned the routine for the final dance in the movie. LOVE.
Another DD fan here. And this morning Yahoo! news reports a remake is planned. Why, why?!
http://news.yahoo.com/lionsgate-announces-dirty-dancing-remake-225710268.html
I’m having a bad HTML code day.
@Lisa I always thought the “Baby” thing probably came from Lisa when she was little. You know…everyone saying, “Look at the baby, Lisa” or “Don’t wake up the baby, Lisa.” And then Lisa started calling her that and then EVERYONE picked it up. I have an Aunt Cissy, whose name is actually Marjorie, but who had younger sibs who called her Sister, which morphed to Cissy and that’s what everyone called her by the time she started school.
I was 12 when it came out and wasn’t allowed to go see it in the theater. When it finally hit the video store and my mom watched and approved, I was SO excited. When I was in college, the sorority house had a copy of DD in all three TV rooms. If I had to venture a guess, I would say that the ONLY movie I’ve seen more times than DD is Star Wars.
Oh my god, I haven’t seen this movie for a long time (which I intend to remedy posthaste), long before I knew much about Ayn Rand and the often insufferable people who are obsessed with her. How effing perfect is it that he offered to lend her “The Fountainhead”? To the genius who added that touch, I say: nicely done.
Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing is the only time a mullet has ever been sexy. Go ahead, argue with me. You will lose because I WILL FIGHT YOU.
Sigh. SO much love for this movie! “I carried a watermelon” is exactly what awkward feels and sounds like.
I watched this a few times when Jennifer Grey (RIP Original-Flavor Nose) was on DWTS and she was (and is) just so graceful. Love her.
Love this movie!! I saw it in my local cinema at age 12 with a group of friends. One friend’s mother insisted on chaperoning us, and we DIED of embarrassment. The mortification escalated when my friend’s mother covered her daughter’s eyes during the sex scene in Johnny’s cabin!!
It took a few viewings for me (sheltered Catholic schoolgirl) to completely understand the abortion subplot.
Re. the soundtrack – yes, there were two (I was also devastated that “Do You Love Me” didn’t appear on the original soundtrack). Now I own “Ultimate Dirty Dancing”, which contains all the songs, including the Kellerman’s Anthem! “Join hands and hearts and voices, voices, hearts and hands…”
An earlier commenter spoke about her mother’s taped version of the movie ending with the lift. The same thing happened for me.
It was a bare few months ago. One of my satellite channels ran the movie. I recorded it because I too, had not seen it since the eighties. I loved every revisiting moment. But either the channel or the satellite messed up and it abruptly ended during the dance scene at the resort finale night. I was extremely unhappy. It is like when you are chewing on something delicious but for some reason need to spit it out. So instead of being able to swallow and have a sense of completion, you are left with the feeling of unfinished business.
Great movie. Oh, and I usually heartily dislike formulaic dance flics. I agree with the reviewer that the portrayal of the social nuances of the time took it far beyond that genre.
I still have crystal clear memories of seeing this amazing, timeless film in the theater opening night. My boyfriend picked me up after my shift ended at Domino’s Pizza and we walked the 3 blocks to the movie theater not knowing what we were going to see.
The movie that we initially chose was sold out and the only thing with tickets available was this little ditty called Dirty Dancing.
My boyfriend was not amused, but as soon as I saw that Swayze was in it my interest was piqued. I had a residual crush on him from “The Outsiders”, “Red Dawn”, and “Youngbloods”. We didn’t know what to expect and I just remember LOVING the film from the first scene where the Housemans pull up to resort.
My heart still flutters at the end when Johnny and the rest of the gang dances in formation down the aisle towards Baby. I seriously good watch that part of the dance 1000 times in a row.
For some reason I own 3 different versions of this movie on dvd. In my defense, I think two of them were gifts.
Love this movie. Mount Holyoke plays it every year during its orientation! Never forget that Baby was named after Frances Perkins. :)
@Lisa They state very clearly in the movie that her name is Frances, but that Baby is her *nickname*.
The very opening of the movie:
“That was the summer of 1963 – *when everybody called me Baby*, and it didn’t occur to me to mind.”
And later:
Johnny: What’s your real name, Baby?
Baby: Frances. For the first woman in the Cabinet.*
Johnny: Frances. That’s a real grown up name.
(*IMDB says that this was Frances C. Perkins, the U.S. Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1947.)
And then Johnny’s speech before the “last dance” – he specifically introduces her as “Miss Frances Houseman”.
We watched Dirty Dancing three nights in a row when I was finishing my degree. And I’ll still watch it every time it’s on TV!
My favourite line is truly bizarre: at one point when they’re all in the breakfast room, the guy who owns the hotel says to one of the guests, “This Danish is pure protein!” WHAT? WHAT IS THAT? It never stops making me laugh.
Dirty Dancing has a special place in my heart because I used to work at a nightclub where the DJ would play “Time of My Life” toward the end of the night if it wasn’t a very busy evening. (This was in 2005, by the way.) Drunk people think they can do the lift in the picture at the top of this post. Drunk people CANNOT. I always found an excuse to be out near the dance floor when this was happening. It usually ended in a flying tackle.
I have trouble enjoying this movie anymore because it was BEATEN TO DEATH when I was in college. My god, someone was watching it in the tv lounge every weekend. On every trip, someone demanded it be played on the coach tv screens. It was like…enough, my god, enough! (Grease was the same way)
It’s too bad because this is a good movie. And I have special fondness for the bit when Swayze has been just hammering on Jennifer Grey during training and she finally tells him off with “We’re supposed to do the show in two days, you won’t show me the lifts, I’m not sure of the turns, I’m doing all this to save your ass, what I really want to do is drop you on it!” She absolutely nails it, it’s one of those great little moments that separate out the average from the good, the good from the great.
Love! I watched Dirty Dancing regularly (much to my husband’s chagrin) until my best friend borrowed it and “lost” it. I remain convinced that either my husband is paying her by the week to keep it lost, or that she has hidden it in the guest bedroom closet so she can watch it whenever she wants to…