Relive those Summer Nights at the Scala

John Travolta’s ducktail hairdo set the craze and burned the path for cool delinquency, everywhere including Thailand. Grease celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, and this Sunday the film will return to the big screen at Scala. The crowd is unlikely to be young, but the spirit, the nostalgia and the scream (hopefully) will set the house alight. Grease was released in the US in 1978, following the success of Saturday Night Fever, which catapulted Travolta into superstardom a year before. In Grease, a prototype of the high-school musical, Travolta plays a Danny, a “greaser” or working-class bad boy from a gang in southern California, who falls in love with pretty girl Sandy, played by Olivia Newton-John in her breakout film role. They sing, dance, fight, have a misunderstanding, make up, and sing and dance a lot more. This is a 1970s film but it’s set in the late 1950s, so it was already nostalgic when it first came out. Now that it is being shown in the 2010s — and now John Travolta, once the coolest cultural icon, has turned 64 — the mirror-hall of nostalgia seems even more potent (and confusing!). Grease is a feel-good story that remembers the “good old days” of the 1950s — and as Roger Ebert put it, to see a contrast vision of that post-war America, watch Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without A Cause. That way we’ll get the full picture. Grease was first released in Thailand three years after it came out in the US. It was one of the films that fell victim to a trade spat known as “Hollywood boycott” when Thai authorities hiked imported tax for film reels, prompting foreign studios to stop sending their movies to Thai cinemas. In 1981, the tax was dropped and the gateway swung open. A number of important American films made in the late 1970s, such as Star Wars, Grease and others, finally found their way to Thai audiences. So, pompadour hair or not, people will flock to the Scala this Sunday at noon. Tickets cost 100 baht, and we’re looking forward to a swinging good time.