Dance Party: Festa Quente

I caught this one while channel searching. At first I simply took a look and then moved on but I found myself coming back and by about the third trip back I was hooked. Yeah it's a little campy and it is a dance movie but I found myself wanting to watch and even dance a little. It is a heartfelt coming of age movie for a young man growing up in the 50 - 60's. Teen love, angst, peer pressure, and the desire to find out who we really are; this movie has it all. I even tried to find it 2nd-hand to buy. I recomend it to anyone who remembers what teen life is all about.

I saw this movie back when I used to get the "Encore" movie channel. The movie to me was campy at first but the more I saw it the more I loved it.Great dancing,likable kids,and songs you just don't hear in

every teen 60's movie.I was heart-broken when I read Orion Studios went broke and this movie was never released on a big scale.I'm not saying the acting is great in fact most of the actors are bad but the spirit of teen dance shows is alive and making you want to get up and boogie. Betten than the show "American Dreams" to me and picking Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" to end the movie was perfect.I, like others also found this movie in the dicount bin and it made my day.Again kudos to whomever picked the songs used in the movie."When You're Young and In Love", "Cast Your Fate to the Wind"..... oh it made me cry.......

I guess when you are a kid of around six or seven, you start to notice the teenagers around you and what they're doing. And for the rest of your life you associate "cool" with the clothes, cars, music, and hair styles of the teenagers you see when you are a little kid. This movie really speaks to me, because I still get goose pimples when I see the fashions, cars, girls, hair, and everything else of the years 1965-67. And the wonderful music! Was there ever a better sound than the Philly sound of those years? I love all those doo-wop tunes--the O'Jays, Gene Chandler, "The Duke of Earl", Curtis Mayfield, Vee-Jay records, "The Real Thing", and on and on...

This film is excellent in so many ways, I can't list them all. First of all, the writer and director, Mark Rosenthal, got the look right. Philly in 1965 was a nice suburban city, with a core of hoods and blacks who brought spirit and life to the City of Brotherly Love. The acting is terrific from the young cast, and the extras put their heart and soul into the dancing and clothing of those years. Joe Pantoliano "becomes" Jerry Blavat and gives a wonderful and energetic performance. And I loved the ending, because the 60's only became the 60's when the kids discovered Dylan, San Francisco, and drugs. It was a step in the wrong direction, but this film serves as a time capsule. Maybe some future generation will rediscover that dancing, love and soul music make youth the best time of life.

A previous commenter made mention of this film being akin to "Dirty Dancing". I think it is closer to "Hairspray", the plot lines are similar (getting on a dance show, how the crowd you are with can affect you) and the soundtracks to both are indeed quite wonderful. Apparently, Ricki Lake is in both pictures, to boot!

While "Hairspray" deserves praise for many things, including, as one critic put it, being so very much entwined in the 1962 Baltimore era it is almost like science fiction, I rather like to root for "In" Crowd, as it has quite a few nice small touches; Del's little brother runs up to him in the middle of the night for fear of monsters and Del lets him crawl into bed with him, Vicky's father's rather inappropriate affection gives us a sad, short insight into her bad home life, the montage of old music shows at the beginning of the film, the silent, paralyzing rage that Parker goes into when he sees Dick Clark (Clark left Philadelphia to go national and Parker never got his national break) to name a few.

It is certainly contrived in spots (some of the dance showcases are pleasant enough, but almost unnecessary), clichéd in some (Vicky's boyfriend is seen near the end of the film during a spooooooky thunderstorm), but it is well...earnest in its intent. The dialog is very good and the performances are at worst, very good, almost to a person. The ending is not a perfectly happy one, nor is it a dour one. It fits well with the movie. Rent it or see it. While not a classic, it is certainly better than it should be.

The time:1965. The place:Phiuladelphia. The movie:The In Crowd. A fun and enjoyable timepiece about the time when Americans enjoyed and loved seeing and participating in dance shows in their various local cities. You see this when the movie ,cleverly, shows the beginnings of several dance TV shows from across the country and the hosts of these TV shows (Sam Riddle in Los Angeles, Wink Markindale in Memphis among others).

The movie centers on three stories. One having the movie's star, Donovan Leitch playing a character called Del. A bright young man with a bright future ahead of him but he wants to be a dancer on the local TV dance program, "Perry Parker's Dance Party". Del doesn't know it but he has nothing in common with the dancers on Perry Parker's show , except that he is a fine dancer himself which gets him a chance to be on the show.

The second part of the movie deals with Perry Parker himself, played by that great actor Joe Pantoliano. Parker .like most people in Philadelphia, feel betrayed that Dick Clark took American Bandstand away from Philaelphia and moved it to Los Angeles.He tries to tell his dancers that if Dick Clark fails the network may want to look for a replacement, like his own show for instance. Parker is like a lot of TV hosts of local shows of that era, hoping to be the next Ed Sullivan, the next Steve Allen, the next Dick Clark, the next Johnnny Carson. Hoping the networks will take him in a make him a big star on network television.

The third part deals with Del and his short love affair with Vicky (Jennifer Runyon). Vicky is pretty but is too lowbrow even for Del. This is one movie where the pretty girl fails to meet the expectations of the supposed geek in the film rather than the other way around. In the end Del tries to help Vicky leave Philadelphia and join her Fonzie like boyfriend Dugan (Scott Plank) as they head for Hollywood.

The In Crowd has great music using some good soul music in the film that is true to the era and not just the same old music you might have heard over and over again in other films about the early 1960's. The choreography is great and inspired and it makes for a good musical and that is what The In Crowd pretty much is. A musical. The living room dance duel between Del and Dugan is proof of that.

The movie told a true tale of how things were changing in America without getting highhanded and clumsy in how they did it. Perry Parker is a prime example of this. An associate producer tells him the show is getting low ratings and that the type of music he has on his show won't work. He should try Mitch Miller instead says the producer. The station manager(Blake Soper) has no use for Parker or his dance show and wants something else. When he brings along a British Invasion like group ,longhair and all to the TV studio and wants Paker to put them on the show, Parker says no saying that,thanks to the long hair, he can't tell if they are boys or girls. He was right, the group was all wrong for his dance show but Perry Parker's days on TV are numbered anyway.

Pantoliano is his usual great self here. As with all of his roles he makes Perry Parker his own. The film is a nice timepiece just before everything came apart in the US.The music, the dance numbers, and some decent acting make this a decent movie if you really wanted to know what America was like back in 1965.

It is the type of tale that Dick Clark tried to tell himself through the American Dreams TV series but failed miserably because the show was all over the map. It wasn't overwrought and overrated like the NBC mini series about the sixties called The 60's. The In Crowd is a good film that wasn't all that appreciated when in came out in theaters in 1988. Hopefully people shall take a better liking to it when they see it again in the future.