Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a fascinating subject, as world-historical show-biz misfires often are. (The movie is briefly included in a brisk montage late in the documentary of Stigwood’s post- Grease flops, but entirely decontextualized.) Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band from Robert Stigwood’s career story. Saturday Night also almost completely removes Sgt. It’s overwhelmingly adulatory and mostly about how Robert Stigwood was very successful, which is the one thing anyone watching it already knows about him. Saturday Night is a slighter documentary than How Can You Mend a Broken Heart in nearly every way. It sat strangely with me that a movie otherwise light on musical and social context would cast a group of straight white guys as the main victims of the most racist, anti-gay, and misogynistic strains of discophobia. After all, the Bee Gees were massively overexposed after Saturday Night Fever, which generally tends to be unsustainable, and they’d had their greatest success with a movie soundtrack, the sort of LP that might disproportionately sell to audiences that might not be in it for the long haul. And yet I’m not sure that it wholly explains why the Bee Gees’ career took a nosedive. The “disco sucks” movement was of course very real and very ugly, and much of it was rooted in bigotry barely disguised as objections of taste, if even disguised at all. How Can You Mend a Broken Heart entirely attributes this to a broader climate of anti-disco backlash that was rooted in homophobia, misogyny, and racism. But I found myself perplexed by the way the film, near its end, chose to address the Bee Gees’ steep commercial downturn in the aftermath of Saturday Night Fever (1977).
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