Grease makes high spirited fantasy - Calgary Herald

By Fred Haeseker Herald staff writer.

GREASE, starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, Palliser Square One and Sunset Drive-In, adult.

Grease is a swirling fantasy of teenage life in the '50s, a rock'n' rolling never-never land where the high school principal is Our Miss Brooks and the parents stay discreetly out of sight.

The real '50s weren't a bit like that, and anyone who was a teenager back then must sometimes wonder why the craze for those drab times ever got started.

But Grease moves beyond the mindless level of nostalgia on which shows like television's Happy Days are founded. It manages to create a world of its own, a world of hard pastel colors and song and dance that owes more to the older traditions of Broadway than the Eisenhower era.

The school (Rydell High), its playing fields, auto shop and auditorium become attractive, kitschy stage sets for choreographic sequences that retain their tightness and drive even with more than 100 dancers on the screen.

The dance sequences, of course, are the highlights of John Travolta's performance. Travolta plays Danny. the leader of the T-Birds, with high-level energy balanced by elastic humor.

Travolta looks so natural in a ducktail that you're tempted to say he was born about 10 years too late and as the coolest greaser at Rydell High, he's dead on as the kind of model you'd want to emu late if you ever carried a rat-tail comb in your right hip pocket.

But Danny is not a hard rock all the way through, and his romance with Sandy, the squeaky-clean blonde who's a new girl at school, is a constant conflict between his inner desires and the macho image he must project to keep his place on top of the pecking order.

Sandy's part is the first major movie appearance for Olivia Newton-John, who establishes a surprisingly strong screen presence as a girl forced to learn the strange customs of a new environment.Her demure style turns off Rizzo (Stockard Channing), the school tramp with a heart of gold who's the leader of a girls' gang called The Pink Ladies. (Channing is striking, made up as the kind of girl who used to try and make herself look like Elizabeth Taylor. Her put-down of Sandy, the song Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee lousy with virginity, provides some of the best moments in the picture.)

The supporting cast includes actors who were TV stars in the '50s: Eve Arden, changed very little since the days of Our Miss Brooks: Edd (Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb) Byrnes as the lecherous host of a show called National Bandstand, and Sid Caesar, who unfortunately doesn't have the space to develop his manic style of madness.

Grease is still running on Broadway after eight years. The movie looks like it might be in for a similar success. It makes a graceful, high-spirited way to say goodbye to a decade that deserves to rest in peace.