Dirty Dancing (1987) Review
8/10
Official trailer
A seventeen-year-old at a Catskills resort in the summer of 1963 learns to dance, falls for the staff instructor, and discovers what her father really thinks about people who work for a living.
The dancing is why people watch it. The plot is about a girl finding out that the principles she was raised on have a boundary, and that she’s standing on the wrong side of it.
Eleanor Bergstein wrote it from her own adolescence. She was a doctor’s daughter called Baby who went to the Catskills and did dirty dancing competitions, and the film is closer to memoir than its reputation suggests. What I like most about Dirty Dancing is how much tougher it is than people give it credit for. Everybody remembers the lift and the final number, and I enjoy both, but the part that stays with me is a good father discovering that his principles stop at the staff door.
I give it an 8 because it’s far smarter than its reputation, it was made on very little money, and it has outlived almost everything released alongside it. What keeps it from going higher is the dialogue, which is uneven, the dubbing, which you can hear in places, and a resolution tidier than the rest of the picture has earned.
It Is About Class
The guests are upstairs and the staff are downstairs and the film is precise about the rules governing both. The waiters are Ivy League boys, hired partly to court the daughters, and Max the owner says so explicitly to them in a staff briefing. In the same breath, he tells the entertainment staff to keep their hands off the guests. The distinction isn’t about behavior, it’s about which class of employee is permitted to marry a customer.
Robbie the waiter, who got Penny pregnant and refuses to pay for the abortion, is the film’s real villain and he’s a medical student with a copy of The Fountainhead. That detail is doing an enormous amount of work in one prop.
That prop delights me. One paperback tells you everything about Robbie’s opinion of himself, and I think he’s a more satisfying creep than most of the villains bigger films of the period bothered to write.
Baby’s father is a decent man who believes in equality and shows it. He treats Penny without payment and without judgment, and the film establishes his goodness thoroughly before it tests him. Then his daughter takes up with somebody who works, and the decency turns out to have a floor under it. His assumption that Johnny is responsible for the pregnancy is a man discovering what he believes when it costs him something. That’s the actual subject and the reason the film still works. The romance is the mechanism for showing a girl the shape of the world she’s been living in without noticing.
A principle only becomes visible when it costs something, and the sequencing counts for more than most writers allow. Baby’s father is sincere in the first act, and the film spends real screen time proving it before the test arrives.
That order is the whole technique. Establish the belief sincerely, show it in an action that costs nothing, and only then present the situation where holding it would cost something real. A character revealed as a hypocrite in their first scene teaches the reader nothing, because there was never anything to lose.
The test on your own draft is to find every belief a character states and ask whether you’ve shown it operating cheaply before you show it failing expensively. If the failure is the first time the reader encounters the principle, you’ve written an exposure. If they watched it work first, you’ve written a collapse, and collapses are what readers remember.
The Abortion Is the Plot
Penny’s illegal abortion is what sets everything in motion. It’s why Baby needs money, why she asks her father for it without explanation, why she has to learn the routine, why she’s at the Sheldrake, why she’s out at night, and why her father is eventually called. Remove it and there’s no film. Bergstein has said in multiple interviews that she built it in structurally so that it couldn’t be cut, because she expected somebody to try. The film was made in 1987 about 1963 and it’s explicit about the conditions. The procedure is unavailable and costs two hundred and fifty dollars. Somebody unqualified performs it with a dirty knife and a folding table, and it takes eight hours.
Penny nearly dies. The scene where Baby fetches her father in the middle of the night and he treats her is played straight and is the most serious material in the picture.
A cosmetics company later offered to sponsor a re-release on condition the abortion was removed, and Bergstein refused. That story has been told enough times to be verified and it’s the best thing about the film’s history. I admire Bergstein for refusing that deal. Cut the abortion and you lose the night Baby fetches her father to Penny, and that scene is a big part of why this gets an 8 from me. It’s played dead straight, and it hits harder than anything else in the picture.
The line about the summer of 1963, before the Beatles, when everybody thought they’d always feel that way, is delivered in the opening narration and is doing period-specific work. The film is set at the last moment before a great deal changed, deliberately.
The Sheldrake and the Talent Show
The plot mechanism everybody forgets is that Johnny and Penny have a paid booking at another hotel, the Sheldrake, and losing it means losing the job.
That’s why Baby has to learn the routine. Penny is recovering, they can’t cancel the booking without the resort finding out they were working elsewhere, and they have to find a replacement in three weeks. The romance happens inside a scheduling problem. It matters because it gives the training sequences a deadline and a consequence. That’s what stops them being a montage. Every rehearsal is against a clock, and failing means Johnny is fired.
The performance itself goes badly and they get through it. That’s the correct outcome. They omit the lift, Baby is visibly frightened, and the film treats a partial success as a success. Then everything collapses anyway, because while they were at the Sheldrake somebody else was robbing the guests, and Johnny has no alibi he can offer without admitting where he was. That’s a properly constructed second act. The thing they did to solve the problem is the thing that makes them unable to defend themselves against the next one, and none of it requires anybody to behave stupidly. This is the stretch I enjoy most as a writer. The alibi trap is so neatly built that I grin when it closes, because the script got there without a single character acting like an idiot.
Give every skill-acquisition sequence a deadline and a penalty, or it’ll read as a montage no matter how well you write it. Baby learning to dance is three weeks to cover a booking that can’t be canceled, and a man’s job depends on it.
The stronger move is the one the film makes next: let the solution create the following problem. Going to the Sheldrake saves the job and destroys the alibi, so the same action does double structural duty. That’s how you build a second act without introducing new material, and it’s why the plot never feels like a series of incidents.
The test is to look at each of your major plot beats and ask what it costs going forward. If solving a problem leaves your characters exactly where they were minus the problem, the beat is inert. If solving it hands the antagonist a weapon, the story is building on itself, and that buildup makes a middle section hold.
Why the Dancing Works
Patrick Swayze was a trained dancer, having studied ballet and worked with the Joffrey. That’s why the film can hold long takes on him without cutting.
Jennifer Grey wasn’t, and the film uses that. Baby is supposed to be learning, badly, and the rehearsal sequences are funny because her incompetence is genuine. The bit with the log over the creek and the carrying practice in the lake are two people who visibly don’t have this yet. That progression is the emotional structure of the film. The romance is transmitted through the acquisition of a skill, and every stage of competence is a stage of intimacy. The script never has to state it. The final number is deliberately imperfect. Baby isn’t suddenly excellent, and the lift works because it’s been failed twice already on screen.
The two leads reportedly didn’t get on, and both of them have talked about it since. You can see the friction in the early rehearsal scenes, and I think it’s the luckiest accident in the film, because it reads exactly right for two people who don’t trust each other yet.
The dubbing is a real flaw. Grey’s dialogue was considerably re-recorded and several lines don’t match her mouth. That’s what a five million dollar budget looks like.
Why It Endures
It cost about five million dollars, was expected to go straight to video, and the studio screened the rough cut for the producer Aaron Russo, who reportedly told them to burn the negative and collect the insurance.
It’s been in continuous circulation for nearly forty years, has a stage musical, a sequel nobody wanted, and one of the best-selling soundtracks of all time.
Part of that is the music and the last twenty minutes. They’re joyous and earned instead of assembled. Part of it is that the film takes a teenage girl’s moral education seriously, which very few films of any budget do.
The line everybody quotes is the father capitulating, and it works because he’s admitting he was wrong about something specific instead of making a general apology. He doesn’t say he was wrong to worry. He says he was wrong about Johnny. The other reason is that the film is unembarrassed. It commits entirely to the romance, to the dancing, to the sentiment, and to the politics, without hedging any of them, and unembarrassed films age better than knowing ones. Bergstein has spent forty years being asked about it and has been consistently clear that it’s a film about class and abortion with dancing in it. That isn’t how it was sold and is what it is.
Should you watch Dirty Dancing?
Yes. Watch it for what it is and ignore how it was marketed. The rough edges are real, and past them you get a political film about a girl learning what her family really believes, two leads who didn’t like each other, and a final dance that’s as joyous as anything the eighties put on screen.
