Opening a Locked Car Door

During a rainstorm, Johnny Castle is taking Baby Houseman into the countryside to practice dancing under the open sky. When he reaches his car, he finds that the passenger-side door is locked and his car key is locked inside. He does not even try the driver-side door, which might be unlocked.

Immediately, Johnny pulls a post out of the ground and uses the post to break in a window so that he can open the door.

The following videos demonstrate alternative ways to open a locked car door.

The Song "This Overload" by Alfie Zappacosta

Two days before their Sheldrake Hotel performance, Baby Houseman and Johnny Castle are quarreling about their dance practices. Johnny says, "let's get out of here". They get into Johnny's car and drive to the countryside.

As they get into the car and drive, the soundtrack plays the song "This Overload", performed by Alfie Zappacosta. The song's lyrics follow:

This overload.
This overload.

I can hear your heels clicking on the sidewalk,
Beating to the rhythm of my heart.
Caught up in you --
You're the only one I want.

I follow you home every night
Just to make sure that you get there alright.
Baby, it's true,
I can't think of anything but you

And what I need, Baby,
Is a little bit of sympathy.
You got me on my knees.
I burn throughout the night.

And I can't live without your love
Won't you help me cure this overload?

Oh, you got to know;
You see me everywhere that you go.
Doesn't that say something?
Obsession's taken hold of me?

All because of you.
You've got to see me through.
I can't take another night alone without you.
Honey, it's true.

I am so hung up on you
What I really need, Baby, is a little of your company.
You got me on my knees.
I burn throughout the night ...

Alfie Zappacosta's 1986 album When I Fall in Love Again

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This song did not exist in 1963, when the story takes place. Rather, the song was recorded for the movie in 1987.

The song's lyrics do not express Johnny's thoughts as they get into the car and drive to the countryside on that day in 1963. Johnny does not feel that an obsession about Baby has taken hold of him. Johnny does not burn throughout the night because of Baby.

At this point in the story, Johnny just wants to train Baby well enough to perform at the Sheldrake Hotel, after which he intends to terminate his involvement with her.

Keep in mind, however, that Baby is narrating this story retrospectively from 1987. The song expresses her own fantasizing in 1987 that Johnny felt so passionately about her on that day in 1963.

On that day in 1963, Baby was obsessed and was burning through the night about Johnny, but he did not reciprocate those feelings yet. She merely fantasized that he too felt so passionately about her.

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The Wikipedia article about Zappacosta includes the following passages.

Alfredo Peter "Alfie" Zappacosta (born 1953 in Sora, Italy), also known by just his surname, is an Italian-born Canadian singer/songwriter.

Zappacosta's first band was Surrender, a five-piece group that recorded three albums in the late 1970s into the early 1980s. In 1984 he recorded his first self-titled solo album which contained the hit singles "Passion" and "We Should Be Lovers". As a result, he won the Juno Award for "Most Promising Male Vocalist".

The next year he lent his vocals to the Canadian charity production "Tears Are Not Enough", produced by David Foster singing the lines "Maybe we could understand the reasons why" in the fifth stanza with Dalbello.

His second album A-Z was released in 1986 and featured the hit singles "When I Fall (In Love Again)" and "Nothing Can Stand In Your Way". Following this, a Zappacosta song "Overload" was added to the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, one of the biggest selling soundtracks of the 80s.

A third album Quick! .. .Don't Ask Any Questions was released in 1990, before Zappacosta took time off to hone his vocal and guitar skills. He also pursued acting in various stage performances, as well as a role in the 2005 Canadian movie Halo. ....

In December 2008, Zappacosta released the album At the Church at Berkeley which features his versions of classic jazz standards. He has been touring Canada to support this album since the summer of 2009. In 2010 Zappacosta released his last album to date, Blame It On Me

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When Baby and Johnny are going to his car, it's raining. Johnny finds that his car keys are locked inside.. Therefore he pulls a post out of the ground and uses the post to break through a car window so that he can open the door.

As they drive through the wind, Baby exclaims twice, "You're wild!" They both laugh.

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This scene with the car serves as an interlude that separates two long scenes of dance practice. The car scene is preceded by the "Hungry Eyes" dance-practice scene and is followed by the "Hey, Baby" dance-practice scene.

Th interlude's "Overload" song is visceral and hard-drumming -- in contrast to the thoughtful, melodic songs that accompany the two dance-practice scenes.

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Miscellaneous Videos - 60

Dancing "Time of My Life" in a Mini-Dress -- 14

Sometimes you see things you don't want to see

The following article was contributed by reader Nirmala.

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Baby and Neil see Lisa and Robbie

Neil and Baby see a disheveled Lisa rushing out of the woods, followed by Robbie. Neil remarks to Baby:

Sometimes in this world,
you see things
you don't want to see.

Listed below are other moments when characters see things they don't want to see.

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Penny sees Robbie and Lisa

When the ladies are trying on wigs, Penny looks at Robbie with disdain as he flirts with Lisa.

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Baby sees Johnny and Vivian

In the gazebo, Baby watches Johnny dance with Vivian, as Max calls Vivian a "bungalow bunny".

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Baby sees Penny

When Neil invites Baby to the kitchen to have something to eat, Baby spots Penny crouched up in a corner, looking distressed.

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Baby and Johnny see the Schumachers

While Baby and Johnny are ending their gig at the Sheldrake Hotel, she spots the Schumachers in the audience. Baby fears that the Schumachers might inform Max. As Baby and Johnny drive back to Kellerman's, Johnny remarks that he too noticed them in the audience.

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Dr Houseman sees Baby and Johnny

While Penny is suffering from a botched abortion, Dr Houseman asks who is responsible her. Johnny says he is responsible, and Dr. Houseman sees Baby holding onto Johnny’s arm.

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Lisa sees Vivian and Robbie

After Lisa confides to Baby that she will "go all the way" with Robbie, Lisa shows up outside his cabin to surprise him. She opens the door and is shocked by the sight of Vivian and Robbie in bed together.

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Vivian sees Baby and Johnny

On the following morning, Vivian comes out of Robbie's cabin and notices Baby coming out of Johnny's cabin. Vivian watches Baby and Johnny reluctantly taking leave from each other.

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Nirmala contributed previous articles about dog calls and mirrors.

Anyone can submit essays or ideas to me at MikeSylwester@gmail.com

Baby Houseman's Thinking About Social Justice -- Part 3

This post follows up Part 1 and Part 2.

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Baby Houseman's decision to attend an all-women college suggests some of her thinking about social disadvantages suffered by women.

An article titled Why You Should Consider a Women’s College, written by Carrie Wofford, includes the following passage.

... there are well-documented findings that classrooms of only (or mainly) women students result in those students participating more actively in the classroom, and reporting higher levels of active learning, higher order thinking, and more academic challenge throughout their four years than women in coed settings report.

Students at women's colleges also report more interaction with faculty. It may simply be that faculty take women more seriously and spend more time nurturing their learning when impressive young men aren't around to dominate the classroom and the faculty members' attention. Just ask the women at Harvard Business School, who've been struggling to break through in classroom discussions and professors' eyes.

In women's colleges, faculty and administrators set high standards for the women students and make clear their expectation that the graduates will achieve great things. This surely leaves a lasting impact on the students.

Studies also show that students at women's colleges ... are dozens of times more likely to stick with math and hard science studies than women who attend coed colleges. Not twice as likely to stick with it but dozens of times more likely. Nobody knows why, but the vast majority of women who enter coed colleges thinking they will major in math or chemistry or some other hard science drop out of those fields (as compared to the "soft sciences" such as sociology and psychology). In contrast, women stick with those studies in women's colleges, and go on to careers in those fields. ...

In a coed college, which includes students of both sexes, many female students are impeded by various social factors. Some women feel -- subconsciously or even consciously -- that they should remain subordinate to men, who naturally are the superior sex in society. In this regard, men enjoy social advantages while women suffer social disadvantages, and so society is not fair to women.

Baby perceives this unfairness, but she intends to ameliorate it for herself by attending an all-women college.

Baby's opinions contrast with many other women's opinions, for example:

* women are not disadvantaged in a both-sexes college

* women should reconcile themselves to such disadvantages

* women should enjoy their conventional, subordinate female roles

* men generally excel over women in many activities

* sexual differences should not be considered to be "unfair".

Baby perceives her disadvantage and the unfairness, and she resolves herself to rise above her disadvantaged, unfair situation -- most importantly by attending an all-women college.

Furthermore, Baby perceives that other women's passive acceptance of such disadvantages and unfairness is the consequence of society's persistent, overwhelming "brainwashing" of females from infancy. Females are taught to accept and adopt their own passivity, subordination and dependency.  

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Michael Harrington's 1962 book The Other America: Poverty in the United States, argued that many poor people remain mired in poverty because of their so-called "Culture of Poverty". This concept had been formulated in the preceding years by sociologist Oscar Lewis, who wrote a series of books about his interviews of poor people in Latin America. Lewis summarized the Culture of Poverty as follows:

The people in the culture of poverty have a strong feeling of marginality, of helplessness, of dependency, of not belonging. They are like aliens in their own country, convinced that the existing institutions do not serve their interests and needs. Along with this feeling of powerlessness is a widespread feeling of inferiority, of personal unworthiness.

This is true of the slum dwellers of Mexico City, who do not constitute a distinct ethnic or racial group and do not suffer from racial discrimination. In the United States the culture of poverty that exists in the black community has the additional disadvantage of perceived racial discrimination.

People with a culture of poverty have very little sense of history. They are a marginal people who know only their own troubles, their own local conditions, their own neighborhood, their own way of life. Usually, they have neither the knowledge, the vision nor the ideology to see the similarities between their problems and those of others like themselves elsewhere in the world.

In other words, they are not class-conscious, although they are very sensitive indeed to status distinctions. When the poor become class-conscious or members of trade union organizations, or when they adopt an internationalist outlook on the world they are, in my view, no longer part of the culture of poverty although they may still be desperately poor.

Harrington's description of the Culture of Poverty was a major reason why his book The Other America became so influential in the early 1960s. In later decades, this aspect of his book has been criticized as "blaming the victims" of poverty. Those critics should read Lewis's books on the subject.

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Lewis's description of the Culture of Poverty is confirmed convincingly by Arnulfo C. Hernández Ojeda, a social worker who for many years has counseled poor adolescents in juvenile detention in San Antonio, Texas.

This superb speech about the Culture of Poverty is continued in Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.

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Baby Houseman would have recognized the Culture of Poverty, just as she recognized a similar phenomenon which might be called the Culture of Feminine Disadvantage.

Baby might have recognized some characteristics of the Culture of Poverty in Johnny Castle and Penny Johnson.

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In contrast to Baby's agreement with Michael Harrington's thinking about poverty in the USA, her father would have agreed largely with Milton Friedman's thinking.

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This post concludes my three-part series about Baby Houseman's Thinking About Social Justice.

Miscellaneous Videos - 59

The Thoughts of Courtney the Fangirl

Courtney's other reviews are at that YouTube webpage.

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Added to this webpage on October 17, 2019

Miscellaneous Videos - 58

Baby Houseman's Thinking About Social Justice -- Part 2

This article follows up Baby Houseman's Thinking About Social Justice -- Part 1.

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At the beginning of the movie Dirty Dancing, declares that she admired her father.

I thought I'd never find a guy as great as my dad.

Toward the end of the movie, however, she criticizes some of his attitudes.

You told me everyone was alike and deserved a fair break. But you meant everyone who is like you. You told me you wanted me to change the world, to make it better, but you meant by becoming a lawyer or an economist and marrying someone from Harvard.

I have changed my mind about Jake Houseman's politics. I had assumed that he is a liberal Democrat, but now I think that he is a conservative Republican. During the 1950s and early 1960s, medical doctors commonly opposed the Democrats' efforts to interfere in the medical profession.

Although 17-year-old Baby still is too young to vote in 1963, she is a liberal Democrat. Her growing disagreement her father's politics is a major factor in her outburst against him. The disagreement also caused him to mock her global idealism.

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When Baby was born in about 1946 (she is 17 in 1963), she was named Frances. Baby was told that she was named after Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor during the entire Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR died in 1945, a year before Baby was born.

In fact, Jake had been hoping that his second child would be a son, who would be named Franklin. Because the second child turned out to be a daughter, she was named Frances, which is the female version of the name Franklin. In other words, Baby essentially was named not after Francis Perkins, but after Franklin Roosevelt.

Although Jake had wanted a son, Jake and Marge decided that their second child would be their last child. This second child would be "the baby of the family" forever, and so she always was called Baby by her family and by everyone else.

As Baby grew up, she became "Daddy's girl", while her sister Lisa aligned much more with the mother. Jake felt that Baby was his quasi-son.

By the time Baby became an adolescent, Jake might have stopped calling this daughter by the infantile name Baby and begun calling her instead by the tomboyish name Frankie. My explanation for Jake's persistent use of the name Baby was that he changed his political opinion about Franklin Roosevelt. Jake had become so critical of Roosevelt that he resisted calling his daughter any variation of the name Franklin.

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When Baby was born in 1946, Jake was in his mid- or upper-twenties. During the 1950s, Jake prospered in his medical career. He specialized in cardiology and treated wealthy men such as Max Kellerman. Like most doctors, Jake opposed government interference in the medical profession.

When Harry Truman was President during the years 1945 1953, he tried to establish a medical-insurance system that was managed by the Federal Government. The political opposition to Truman's attempt was funded and led by the American Medical Association, which denounced Truman's plan as "socialized medicine".

In these circumstances, Jake left the Democratic Party and joined the Republican Party. He became a political supporter of President Dwight Eisenhower, whose medical-insurance proposals were rather moderate.

In the 1960 Presidential election, about 83% of Jewish voters voted for the Democrat, President Kennedy, but Jake was among the 17% who voted for the Republican, Richard Nixon. For Jake the decisive political consideration was that the government should refrain from meddling into free-market economics, in particular into the medical profession.

Marge might or might not have shared Jake's political opinions, but anyway Baby paid attention mostly to Jake's political opinions.

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If Jake had become an Eisenhower Republican, then his political opinions would include the following principles:

Free-market economics is the foundation of American prosperity.

The government should refrain from meddling in private business.

America is a meritocracy and is the land of opportunity.

People who work intelligently, diligently and honestly should and do prosper.

Successful people should not be taxed excessively.

Society should not be blamed for individuals' faults and failings.

Charity should be done mostly in the private sphere.

As Baby grew up, she absorbed these principles from her father.

In the past year, however, she has been confronted by claims from other people that much of the population of the world, in particular of the USA, lives in poverty. These poor people are disadvantaged by their societies. They could rise from their poverty only if they were helped by society and by government.

Perhaps Baby has heard about or even read Michael Harrington's book The Other America: Poverty in the United States, which was published in 1962.

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Baby's disagreement and disillusionment with her father's political opinions has been developing for months before the Dirty Dancing story begins in August 1963. The hostility is mutual. On the family's first night in the hotel's restaurant, both of Baby's parents mock her idealism publicly.

Marjorie Houseman
Look at all this leftover food. Are there still starving children in Europe?

Baby Houseman
Try Southeast Asia, Ma.

Marjorie Houseman
Right.

Jake Houseman
Robbie, Baby wants to send her leftover pot roast to Southeast Asia, so anything you don't finish, wrap up.

Max, our Baby's going to change the world.

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A few days later, however, Baby uses Jake's own teachings against him. Since charity should be done mostly in the private sphere, Jake has taught Baby, she is obligated to exercise private charity to help people in trouble. Jake surely gives Baby a regular allowance and has taught her that she should donate some of her allowance privately to charities.

Therefore, when Baby needed $250 for Penny Johnson's abortion, Baby was able to get it from her father by saying:

You always told me if someone was in trouble, I should help. Could you lend me $250?

Jake gives her the money after obtaining only her assurance that the money is not for some illegal purpose. He does not inquire about the recipient of Baby's charity, because he has taught her to donate privately.

Jake assumed mistakenly that the person in trouble was Neil Kellerman.

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From this perspective of Baby's long-developing disagreement with her father about social justice,  I analyze Baby's monologue against her father as follows.

You told me everyone was alike and deserved a fair break, but you meant everyone who is like you.

Superficially, Baby is complaining that her father has not given Johnny Castle a fair break in regard to the abortion. Jake has insinuated, without learning the facts, that Johnny is guilty in the abortion.

More profoundly, however, Baby is complaining that Jake is unconcerned about the 20% of the US population that lives in poverty because they have not received a fair break in their lives. Jake should recognize that all that poverty should not be attribute to laziness and foolishness. Those poor people have not received a fair break!

Baby insinuates that her father is concerned about this social justice because those poor people are not like him. They are racial minorities or are uneducated or are trapped in chaotic living conditions or are suffering from other personal or social disadvantages that are not entirely their own fault.

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You told me you wanted me to change the world, to make it better, but you meant by becoming a lawyer or an economist and marrying someone from Harvard.

Superficially, Baby is complaining that her father has prohibited her from socializing with the dancers and the low-class employees who lead unconventional lives -- who drop out of school, work in occasional, itinerant jobs and get involved in pregnancies out of wedlock.

More profoundly, however, Baby is complaining that Jake has been discouraging her from her intention to join the Peace Corps. Jake will try to keep Baby from involving herself dangerously in poverty's squalor -- especially the squalor abroad. He will argue that she can help the world more by working as a professional expert in a powerful institution rather than helping to dig a water well in one Cambodian village.

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The Dirty Dancing story takes place about a year after the publication of Michael Harrington's book The Other America: Poverty in the United States. Harrington's book revealed that about 20% of the US population lived in poverty despite the USA's general prosperity. The book provided a major justification for the War on Poverty, which President Lyndon Johnson declared on January 8, 1964 -- about four months after Baby's monologue against her father.

Another passage of that speech follows:

The program I shall propose will emphasize this cooperative approach to help that one-fifth of all American families with incomes too small to even meet their basic needs.

Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls where other citizens help to carry them.

Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.

But whatever the cause, our joint Federal-local effort must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists -- in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks or in migrant worker camps, on Indian Reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas.

Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it. No single piece of legislation, however, is going to suffice.

We will launch a special effort in the chronically distressed areas of Appalachia.

We must expand our small but our successful area redevelopment program.

We must enact youth employment legislation to put jobless, aimless, hopeless youngsters to work on useful projects.

We must distribute more food to the needy through a broader food stamp program.

We must create a National Service Corps to help the economically handicapped of our own country as the Peace Corps now helps those abroad.

We must modernize our unemployment insurance and establish a high-level commission on automation. If we have the brain power to invent these machines, we have the brain power to make certain that they are a boon and not a bane to humanity.

We must extend the coverage of our minimum wage laws to more than 2 million workers now lacking this basic protection of purchasing power.

We must, by including special school aid funds as part of our education program, improve the quality of teaching, training, and counseling in our hardest hit areas.

We must build more libraries in every area and more hospitals and nursing homes under the Hill-Burton Act, and train more nurses to staff them.

We must provide hospital insurance for our older citizens financed by every worker and his employer under Social Security, contributing no more than $1 a month during the employee's working career to protect him in his old age in a dignified manner without cost to the Treasury, against the devastating hardship of prolonged or repeated illness.

We must, as a part of a revised housing and urban renewal program, give more help to those displaced by slum clearance, provide more housing for our poor and our elderly, and seek as our ultimate goal in our free enterprise system a decent home for every American family.

We must help obtain more modern mass transit within our communities as well as low-cost transportation between them.

Above all, we must release $11 billion of tax reduction into the private spending stream to create new jobs and new markets in every area of this land.Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope--some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity.

This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort.

It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest Nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it. One thousand dollars invested in salvaging an unemployable youth today can return $40,000 or more in his lifetime.

Poverty is a national problem, requiring improved national organization and support. But this attack, to be effective, must also be organized at the State and the local level and must be supported and directed by State and local efforts.

For the war against poverty will not be won here in Washington. It must be won in the field, in every private home, in every public office, from the courthouse to the White House.

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This article will continue in a Part 3.

How come nobody makes a movie about Matteo's "Panama" dance?

Watching Baby Dance in a Mirror

This post follows up a post titled Reflection and Projection: The Symbolism of the Mirrors, which was written by a reader named Nirmala. To her article, I add the following observations of my own.

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A couple of deleted scenes show Baby Houseman looking at herself in mirrors.

3:11 - 4:16 = Baby and Johnny practice dancing in front of a mirror

5:12 - 6:01 = Baby and Lisa primp in front of mirrors in their bedroom

By the way, I think that the same song is playing in both those scenes.

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Two scenes show Baby and Johnny dancing in a mirror.

1) That deleted scene (in the above video at 3:11 - 4:16)

2) The first part of the "Wipeout" scenes (in the below video at 0:02 to 0:17)

When the movie audience sees Baby and Johnny dancing in a mirror, there is a subconscious effect where some audience members might imagine themselves being in the scene. This effect works for both sexes.

A woman in the audience looks in a mirror, sees Baby, and imagines herself to be Baby dancing with Johnny in the scene.

A man in the audience looks in a mirror, sees Johnny, and imagines himself to be Johnny dancing with Baby in the scene.

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We'll fight harder, Frances, that's what we'll do

The following dialogue was filmed but was not included in the movie Dirty Dancing. The video does not play on blogs, so you will have to click on the following image and then click on the words Watch this video on YouTube.

Baby Houseman
Do you know what I'm scared of, Johnny? I'm scared they'll beat us down and they'll say we have our whole lives ahead of us -- that I'm going into the Peace Corp, and you're going dancing, and we don't know what we feel.

Johnny Castle
[interrupting] think we don't know what we feel

Baby Houseman
And we'll start thinking it wasn't such a big deal, and then everyone will be against us -- even us. What'll we do then, Johnny?

Johnny Castle
We'll fight harder, Frances, that's what we'll do. We'll fight harder.

The above dialogue is foreshadowed by dialogue that occurred previously in the movie.

* Baby had said that she was scared

* Baby had said she would join the Peace Corps

* Baby had said that her real first name was Frances

* Baby had told Johnny to fight harder

Because of those foreshadowings, I think that the above dialogue was in the original script. However, that dialogue was replaced in the movie by the segment from 5:44 to 6:06 in the following video clip.

I analyzed that segment of the movie in my previous article The Psychology of the Movie's Denouement. There I analyzed the segment from 5:44 to 6:06 as follows:

5:44 - 6:06

A close-up of the faces of Baby and Johnny as they continue dancing.

Johnny mouths the song's lyrics. Johnny is communicating to Baby that HE has had the time of his life with her. Baby reacts by looking up and smiling adoringly toward Johnny.

The movie already knows that SHE has had the time of her life, but now sees that HE too has had the time of his life and is even mouthing the long's lyrics to confirm this feeling of his.

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I think that Bergstein's "fight harder" dialogue was replaced at the insistence of Patrick Swayze.

In a previous article, titled My Speculations About Script Changes Made by the Swayzes and by Rhodes, I argued that because Swayze was not paid his due salary for appearing in the movie, he was compensated partially by an unusual ability to insist on script changes.

Swayze mentioned in his autobiography that he thought that the movie's story should have ended with Johnny getting together as a couple not with Baby, but rather with Penny. Because Swayze had that opinion about the story, he surely objected to the above "fight harder" dialogue, which indicated that Johnny and Baby (not Penny) would get together as a couple.

The 5:44-6:06 segment was (I speculate) an compromise between Bergstein and Swayze. The movie audience can interpret that ambiguous segment as indicating only that Johnny might -- but might not -- get together with Baby as a couple.

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Earlier that day, a few hours before the talent show, Johnny and Baby had parted from each other. They had not made any plans to get together later.

What changed?

Johnny came unexpectedly to the talent show and performed a dance with Baby.

Then Baby's father became informed that Johnny had not made Penny pregnant, and so Baby's father apologized to Johnny.

That was not enough of a change to justify Johnny and Baby deciding to get together as a couple. They did not even discuss such a decision before they began their "fight harder" dialogue.

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I speculate that Bergstein made a good decision by listening to Swayze's criticism of her "fight harder" dialogue and by compromising with him to replace that dialogue with the ambiguous 5:44-6:06 segment.

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See also my previous article titled The Psychology of the Movie's Happy Ending.

The 1962 Move "Don't Knock the Twist"

Four movie were made featuring Chubby Checker and the twist dance that he made popular.

* Teenage Millionaire in 1961

* Twist Around the Clock in 1061

* It's Trad, Dad in 1962

* Don't Knock the Twist in 1962

I recently was able to watch the fourth movie, because it was broadcast on the Turner Classic Movies (TCM) television channel. The movie's story was lousy, but it did depict popular culture -- dancing, fashions, entertainment and male-female relationships -- in the early 1960s.

I assume that the movie's target audience was people who liked to watch Chubby Checker perform. Checker was a young man -- he turned 21 years old in 1962 -- but he was a handsome, pleasant, talented Negro who appealed largely to an Caucasian audience of all ages. In that regard he was similar to the other popular Negro male entertainers such as Nat King Cole, Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby.

In the movie's opening scene, the president of the GBC television network orders Ted Haver, the Director of Special Programing, to prepare a 90-minute show about the twist, to be broadcast on August 28, 1962, which is only four weeks away. The preparation is being rushed so that GBC will be able to broadcast its own twist show before a rival network, FBS, will broadcast a twist show on September 15.

Haver visits Checker, an old friend, to ask for help in preparing the twist show. Notice that Checker performs with Caucasian musicians. In this scene they are merely rehearsing, so they are dressed casually. When they perform, they all are dressed in suits and ties.

The following video clip shows the entertainment in the nightclub where Checker performs. In general, all the performers in the movie are Caucasians except for Checker and one other singer (whose face is obscured).

Ted Haver is in a sexual but unmarried boyfriend-girlfriend relationship with Dulcie Corbin, a professional designer of women's clothing. Inspired by Ted's preparations for the twist show, Dulcie begins designing a new clothing line for women who want to dance the twist.

Through a series of events that are worthwhile to tell here, Ted and Dulcie become acquainted with a young woman, Madge Albright, who is an attractive and talented dancer of the twist. Ted hires Madge to dance in the twist show, while Dulcie hires Madge to model the clothing line.

More stuff happens that is not worthwhile to tell here. Then the GBC network broadcasts its twist show, which feature Madge dancing the twist in a dress that Dulcie had designed.

After Madge's dance, the GBC continues with Checker performing again. The show ends with the entire studio audience getting up and dancing the twist.

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The actress who played the character Madge Albright was Georgine Darcy, who reminds me of the Dirty Dancing character Penny Johnson (played by actress Cynthia Rhodes).

Georgine Darcy dancing in the foreground

Unfortunately, YouTube did not have any videos showing Darcy dancing in the movie -- except the fourth video above. In the movie, Darcy is beautifully photogenic and a great dancer.

As a teenager, she worked as a model and studied ballet. She left her New York home at age 16 and moved alone to California to pursue a career as a movie actress. She did not achieve success in movies beyond this 1962 movie, but she did appear in various bit parts in movies and television.

Georgine Darcy

Georgine Darcy

Darcy was about 30 years old when the movie Don't Knock the Twist was made, although her character Madge is a young woman who still lives at home with her father and brother (the brother character is dancing with her in the above photograph).

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There are no real teenage characters in the movie. The actors who played Ted and Dulcie were well past the age of 30. In general depicts the lifestyles of middle-aged successful professional people in 1962. They dance the twist when they dress up and date in nightclubs because the dance is easy and popular. They dance to pop music performed by Caucasian male musicians who wear suits and ties.