Saturday Night Fever ranks among the finest dance- music melodramas of the 1970s.
It was added to The New York Times “Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made”, which was published in 2004.
In 2010, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Film critic Gene Siskel, who would later list this as his favorite movie, wrote: “One minute into Saturday Night Fever you know this picture is onto something, that it knows what it’s talking about.” He also praised John Travolta’s energetic performance: “Travolta on the dance floor is like a peacock on amphetamines. He struts like crazy.”
Critic Pauline Kael wrote a gushing review of the film in The New Yorker: “The way Saturday Night Fever has been directed and shot, we feel the languorous pull of the discotheque, and the gaudiness is transformed. These are among the most hypnotically beautiful pop dance scenes ever filmed … Travolta gets so far inside the role he seems incapable of a false note; even the Brooklyn accent sounds unerring …
At its best, though, Saturday Night Fever gets at something deeply romantic: the need to move, to dance, and the need to be who you’d like to be. Nirvana is the dance; when the music stops, you return to being ordinary.”
Historians Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton wrote in their book “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life”: “The Bee Gees did for disco what Elvis Presley did for rhythm and blues, what Diana Ross did for soul, what Dave Brubeck did for jazz; they made it safe for white, straight, middle-class people, hauling it out of its subcultural ghetto and into the headlight glare of the mainstream. Here was something middle America could move its uptight ass to.”
However, historians of disco have criticized the film as a whitewashed representation of disco. Katherine Karlin wrote: “The film is wrongly credited with sparking the disco culture; it’s more accurate to say that it marks the moment when disco—up to that moment a megaphone for voices that were queer, black, or female—became accessible to straight white men, and thus the moment marking its decline.”
There is not a single black or queer character in the film, though it is known that it was gay men who put disco on the map, not just in the U.S. but all over western Europe
