‘Dirty Dancing’ has stpped into history

Sometime in the late 1980s, Jerry Orbach was at Madison Square Garden watching a Knicks game when he noticed that the two teenage girls sitting next to him kept glancing his way. Orbach wasn’t exactly a big star at the time -- this was pre-”Law and Order” and he doubted the teens knew him from his Broadway work in shows like “Promises, Promises.” So when one of the girls turned around and asked, “Ain’t you Baby’s father?” Orbach realized he had become part of a real phenomenon.

The Tony Award-winning actor had recently appeared in a little indie film called “Dirty Dancing,” as the father of Frances ‘Baby’ Houseman (Jennifer Grey), the movie’s protagonist. No one involved with the picture seemed to like the title very much -- it seemed pornographic -- and with a $5 million budget and a mostly no-name cast, there were no great expectations of commercial success.

But a strange thing happened on the road to oblivion: The unassuming tale of a young girl’s first love, helped along by some hot dance sequences and the sweaty charisma of co-star Patrick Swayze, became a monster success. Since its release in summer 1987, “Dirty Dancing” has grossed over $170 million internationally (at one time it was the highest-grossing independent film ever), spawned a soundtrack album (which includes the Oscar-winning song “(I Had) The Time of My Life”) that has sold over 9 million units, and a DVD version that sells 1 million copies annually.

“Dirty Dancing” is, quite simply, the gift that keeps on giving. Earlier this month, Artisan Home Entertainment, current owner of the movie originally released by now-defunct Vestron Pictures, released a new two-disc “Ultimate Dirty Dancing” DVD, which is expected to move nearly 1 million units in its first two months of release. And the February theatrical debut of “Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights,” a “re-imagining” of the original movie set in pre-Castro Cuba, likely will only draw more attention to the original (“Havana Nights” stars international hotties Diego Luna of “Y Tu Mama Tambien” and Romola Garai of “I Capture the Castle”).

“The film has a timeless feel and a universality that will always appeal to young people going through the transition to adults,” Orbach says. “It’s a young girl’s coming of age. It’s a wonderful love story, and very uplifting.”

A simpler time

But it’s more than that. “Dirty Dancing” also touches on issues of class and race, and in its depiction of a more innocent period in history, seduces its audience with nostalgia. The picture takes place in a New York mountain resort in 1963, the summer before JFK’s assassination. Baby, an innocent young woman about to go off to college, finds that she is drawn to the “help,” whose easy sexuality and hot dancing techniques are a far cry from her staid lifestyle. She soon enters into a passionate affair with Johnny Castle (Swayze), the resort’s dance instructor and resident dreamboat. The relationship meets with the disapproval of Baby’s doctor dad, but in the end, love triumphs over class prejudice.

If the plot seems formulaic, well, it is. And when “Dirty Dancing” was released in August 1987, the reviews weren’t exactly positive. Variety called the film “skin-deep but inoffensive,” while Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, said it was a “tired and relentlessly predictable story of love between kids from different backgrounds.”

They and most other reviewers missed the point.

Susannah Gora, a “Dirty Dancing” fan and editor at Premiere magazine who claims every girl in her sixth-grade class was “Swayze crazy,” adds that “no matter what age you are, you have to love this story of this girl who is unsure of herself and through the power of dance and love discovers who she can really be.”

Adds Grey, whose character goes from insecure ugly duckling to self-confident hottie as the film progresses: “I know a lot of girls who didn’t consider themselves pretty would come up to me and say, ‘Everyone tells me I look just like you.’ And it always thrilled me. To play someone who was completely unaware of her power as a woman is the thing that is so beautiful.”

This transformative-power-of-love element is at the core of “Dirty Dancing’s” enduring popularity -- the idea, says Eleanor Bergstein, the film’s writer and co-producer, that “the Baby character transforms herself into someone so beautiful because of her spirit that no one can question why Johnny loves her.”

But class is also a powerful element in the film. The workers live in a separate section of the resort, which is off-limits to guests. Baby transgresses by crossing that line, but by doing so she also enters a world which is friendlier, more racially liberal, and definitely more sexually active.

Sure, it’s the ultimate cliche, that the working class is having more fun than the boring old college types, but this attraction to the Other, Grey says, is something that has been with us “from the beginning of time. There’s a lack of obeying the rules in this freedom of loving who you love, and that applies to gay people, and class, and race, and anyone who loves who they’re not supposed to love.”

And, Bergstein adds, in the character of Johnny, who turns out to be a real stand-up guy, the film is also about “disenfranchised people having a chance to show what they’re worth.”

For all these reasons, coupled with a nostalgic yearning for a time that was pre-assassination, Vietnam, AIDS, you name it, the film has maintained, and even expanded, its audience. Steve Beeks of Artisan Home Entertainment says “Dirty Dancing’s” fans come not just from the ranks of those who saw it the first time around but include people who weren’t even born at the time. “Because it’s such a great love story,” he says, “it appeals to women of all ages.”

And, it seems, to those from every country. Talk to people who were in the film, and it’s immediately apparent that wherever they’ve traveled -- China, Italy, France -- someone has come up to them and mentioned their personal attachment to “Dirty Dancing.” Or they’ll quote favorite lines from the movie.

“I can’t tell you how many times people have come up to me and said, ‘Nobody puts Baby in the corner,’ ” says Grey, referring to a key bit of dialogue Swayze delivers to Orbach. And as far as she’s concerned, it never gets old.

“If people find something as innocent and benign as ‘Dirty Dancing,’ and it makes their life a little nicer, then I am so happy I was able to provide any part of that for them,” Grey says. “It’s the biggest blessing in the world.”