John wayne

Saturday Night Fever It would be difficult to overestimate the influence and importance of John Travolta and Saturday Night Fever on images of masculinity in cinema. From the moment we first clap eyes on him, as disco wide-boy Tony Manero, strutting through the Brooklyn streets to the sounds of the Bee Gees' Stayin' Alive, he owns the screen and the movie. As much as Robert De Niro, John Wayne or Steve McQueen, Travolta represented both a celebration of male arrogance and inarticulacy – and a pitiless analysis of it. As Tony, he is lovably cocksure, but prone to an emotional volatility that can be revealed at the drop of a stylus on vinyl. His passion for disco, and the tenderness with which he approaches his evenings on the glowing dancefloor (with the intensive grooming regime this entails), is strangely ennobling. It's away from the disco that his troubles accumulate. John Badham was brought in after disagreements between John G Avildsen, the Oscar-winning director of Rocky, and the film's producer, Robert Stigwood. Badham's main accomplishment is to keep the camera on his star, fill our ears with the vivid and electrifying soundtrack and evoke Tony's love-hate relationship with the grimy vitality of Brooklyn; the dance contest that he enters with his similarly restless girlfriend Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney) becomes a crucible for his dreams, but also a focus for the injustices that persist beyond the disco walls. There's a playful rapport between the two lovers that gives Travolta ample opportunity to flash his insouciant grin. ("Nice move, did you make it up?" asks Stephanie admiringly. "Yeah, well I saw it on TV first," Tony shrugs, "then I made it up.") The actor quickly became a byword for bad career choices and squandered potential, but Saturday Night Fever alone is enough to ensure his place in cinema history. This Is Spinal Tap A rock mockumentary important enough to be selected for preservation in the US Library of Congress, This Is Spinal Tap is one of the all-time greats, and its influence looms large to this day. Ostensibly following a semi-forgotten rock band's comeback tour, Tap manages to hit so many targets – the labyrinthine backstage corridors, the onstage mishaps, the unwanted influence of a resident Yoko Ono figure – that several real-life rockers admit that they struggle to find the humour in it. But their loss is everyone else's gain. Even if you haven't seen This Is Spinal Tap, you know about it (there's a reason why the BBC iPlayer volume switch goes up to 11), and you've probably been quoting it for years. Shriekingly funny, full of standout performances and containing some of the best parody songs you're ever likely to hear, This Is Spinal Tap is so much better than you could ever expect from a film starring Harry Shearer (the voice of Ned Flanders), and Baron Haden-Guest.