There's never been a better time to watch Dirty Dancing

Released 30 years ago this week, the film is far more politically radical than you remember

The movie has a striking relevance in today's world.
(Image credit: United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo)

In 1987, Americans flocked to a movie about the forbidden love between a young Jewish radical and a male prostitute. Dirty Dancing, which was released 30 years ago this week, is often remembered as nothing more than a teenybopper classic, and lumped in with other offerings of the time like Footloose and Flashdance and Fame: MTV-era musicals about characters who danced their problems away. But Dirty Dancing is also one of the most highly politicized movies ever to achieve success among mainstream teenage audiences. It was so successful, in fact, that its status as a classic now easily eclipses its subject matter — and the reasons it still offers something to today's young viewers that few movies since have even attempted to provide.

Frances "Baby" Houseman (Jennifer Grey), a liberal but sheltered young doctor's daughter, comes to a Catskills resort with her family, expecting to kill time before starting her first semester at Mt. Holyoke in the fall. "That was the summer of 1963," her voiceover tells us in the first few moments. "When everybody called me Baby, and it didn't occur to me to mind. That was before President Kennedy was shot, before the Beatles came, when I couldn't wait to join the Peace Corps, and I thought I'd never find a guy as great as my dad. That was the summer we went to Kellerman's."

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Sarah Marshall's writings on gender, crime, and scandal have appeared in The Believer, The New Republic, Fusion, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015, among other publications. She tweets @remember_Sarah.