Starring: Kevin Bacon, Lori Singer, John Lithgow, Sarah Jessica Parker, Chris Penn
Year of Release: 1984
Running Time: 110 minutes
On the surface, the premise of the classic 80s film seems a little unbelievable: Ren McCormack (Kevin Bacon) moves to a small repressed Midwestern town that has made dancing and rock music illegal and spends the duration of the film trying to loosen up (footloosen?) the town's conservatives, including a tiresome pastor (John Lithgow). The scary thing is that the plot is actually based on a real town, Elmore City in Oklahoma, which had banned dancing since its establishment in an effort to reduce heavy drinking. A reverend from a neighboring town is on record as saying that "No good has ever come from a dance. If you have a dance somebody will crash it and they'll be looking for only two things - women and booze".
So in this case, fiction and reality were not so far apart. Indeed, 27 years since the film's release, the same conservative values dominate many small towns across America, with lawmakers trying to subjugate people in the name of morality and "religious values" - deciding what children can and can't read, what women can and can't do with their bodies, which groups can be denied medical treatment and so on. At least the film has a happy ending as the teenagers of Bomont get to cut loose at their prom.
A reboot was made in 2011, starring Kenny Wormald and Julianne Hough in the lead roles. While the film tried to stay true to the original, it lacked same spark and sensuality that Kevin Bacon and Lori Singer brought to the original. I think it is another example of why it is sometimes best to leave a classic be and not try and reimagine it for a new generation.
The original film opens with the local pastor preaching brimstone and fire, pestilence and plagues - and the evils of rock 'n roll music (insert eyeroll here). The preacher's daughter, Ariel, is clearly looking for ways to rebel against her father's tyranny as evidenced by her daredevil stunt straddling her friend's car and her boyfriend's pickup while they are speeding towards an oncoming truck. But nothing says rebel more than smuggling a cassette tape and playing it on a boombox outside a diner.
Ren is the new kid in town and it is clear that he is about to shake things up. He finds out why dancing and rock music were banned within the town limits: a bunch of kids were killed after a night of debauchery and the town blamed it on the boogie. Ren then makes it his mission to change the opinions of the town council and to bring back the unadulterated freedom of dancing!
The film has several highlights:
Ren's gymnastic routine in his grey sweatpants
The chicken race with the tractors (with Bonnie Tyler's Holding Out For A Hero playing)
Sarah Jessica Parker is delightful (her overprocessed perm, not so much)
The first dance montage (to Never by Moving Pictures) in which Ren sweats out his frustration (in very tight jeans) by dancing around the empty flour mill
Ren drives his friends to a country bar 100 miles out of town to show and they dance to Footloose (the film's theme song, performed by Kenny Loggins)
Ren's friend, Willard (played by Chris Penn), turns out to be a really likeable character and the montage of his dancing lessons with Ren (to Deniece Williams' Let's Hear It For The Boy) is adorable
Ren using the bible against the sanctimonious hypocrites on the town council
The fun-filled, toe-tapping final prom scene in which the teens dance to Footloose - probably one of the best dancing finales ever (with Dirty Dancing being the best of course)
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