Randal Kleiser gives youthful posing plenty of colour and movement. We recommend Grease for its performers and dancing, while its thin romance reveals his limitation: a busy frame can distract him from the scene he needs to stage.
Fi1m perspective
In Grease (1978), the dancers fill the frame and the high school becomes a place where everyone is putting on a performance. Randal Kleiser does not trouble himself with making these pupils resemble actual children. Albert Wolsky's costumes announce the characters before they speak, helping to make the adolescent posing funny. We laughed at the effort they put into presenting themselves; the exaggeration makes the film's artificial school feel appropriate. Kleiser is good at giving a group something to do, even when the romance offers little reason to care.
That interest in an enlarged, idealised version of youth runs through his work, rather than belonging only to the musical. Before his feature debut with Grease, he had worked with John Travolta on The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976). In The Blue Lagoon (1980), that interest in young romance went with remote locations and natural light. Summer Lovers (1982) continued his preference for youth made more attractive and more dramatic than everyday experience.
Grease works best when his collaborators give that preference something concrete. Cinematographer Bill Butler keeps the group numbers lively by letting the dancers fill the frame, while Philip M. Jefferies's production design supplies a school suited to all that posing. Travolta's dancing and Stockard Channing's sharpness give us reasons to stay interested that Bronté Woodard's screenplay cannot consistently provide. Between songs, the romance needs emotional weight that the writing has not earned. Kleiser also sometimes lets activity within the frame stand in for a properly staged joke, so even the busier passages are not reliably funny.
His subsequent family adventures include Flight of the Navigator (1986), whose pioneering digital morphing effects point towards another lasting interest. Later theme-park attractions and VR and AR work continue that technological curiosity, while the personal drama It's My Party (1996) marks a departure from the lighter films. It would be too narrow to treat him simply as a supplier of teenage romance. But it is Travolta's dancing and Channing's sharpness in Grease that make us most inclined to recommend him. Begin there, with modest expectations of the love story.
Biography
Randal Kleiser is an American film and television director, producer and screenwriter. He was born on 20 July 1946 in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and studied at the University of Southern California.
Kleiser directed several television movies in the 1970s, including The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976). His feature debut was the musical Grease (1978). Subsequent films include The Blue Lagoon (1980), Summer Lovers (1982), Flight of the Navigator (1986), Big Top Pee-wee (1988), White Fang (1991) and Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992). His short film Peege (1973) was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress National Film Registry.
