Grease

The Seventies are coming to Sky Movies this week!

And to celebrate I am going to share with you my thoughts on my favourite Seventies film, Grease (it’s on tonight at eight).

This, children, is irony. Or it could be synchrony. Or it could just be plain daft. I am writing nostalgically about a 1970’s film nostalgically set in the 1950’s. Grease was in the cinemas in the late seventies and starred John Revolting and Olivia Neutron-Bomb (or so my mum said). It was an ‘adult’ film, even though it was all about school, which actually looked more like college. And though I begged and cried and pleaded, I wasn’t allowed to see it. Never mind, said mum, in ten years’ time it’ll be on the telly. She wasn’t far wrong, it was on five years later when I was thirteen. Of course, now you can get it for free, and even watch it on YouTube with Spanish subtitles.

My friend Julie told me that there was a scene of the two stars in the bath together, *naked*, presumably the pinnacle of naughtiness for eight-year-olds. No matter how many times I’ve watched this film, I haven’t found this scene. I can only conclude that she was either lying or she was in the wrong cinema that day.

However, there are some very slight references to sex and one point where Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) slams the door on Danny (John Travolta) and if you know what you’re looking for this is much more hilarious as an adult than as a child.

I really can’t see why I wasn’t allowed to watch Grease, it was probably more to do with it being expensive to go to the cinema than it being an adult film. Watching the film now I see it as both a fifties and a seventies film. I mean, the cheesy musical was soooo seventies, and look at those hairstyles, they were more like the seventies idea of what fifties hairstyles were like rather than actual fifties hairstyles as seen from genuine fifties footage.

The best part of Grease for me had to be Stockard Channing as Rizo. There was something about a smart-mouthed, sassy bitch which really got me going, even when I was that young. Sandy was just too pitiably good. And then when she got bad at the end it was sickening. So when I watch it, I watch it for Rizo. Mm-hm.

---

Josie Henley-Einion, author, blogger, Legend in my own Living Room