I recently saw Jimmy Fallon ran a segment on The Tonight Show called “Honest Movie Reviews”, where they described Grease as “a bunch of people in their 30s, playing teenagers in the 50s, singing songs written in the 70s”. All of which is true, but it doesn’t much detract from the charm of Grease. 

Grease is one of relatively few movie musicals that I really like. It became the highest-grossing musical film ever at the time. The soundtrack, meanwhile, topped charts all around the world.

We’ve all heard the classic songs (“You’re the one that I want”, “Summer nights” etc) a bunch of times, but they haven’t aged. (The same is less true of the way in which ‘good girl’ Olivia Newton-John needs to dress like a bitchy slut to win the heart of John Travolta in the climax, but we will gloss over that….)

Here is the original soundtrack album vinyl, which I picked up in a movie memorabilia fair here in France last year.