Good girls have a ‘thing’ for bad boys. Danny Zuko, Johnny Castle, Maverick, and Wolverine … Edward Cullen for you younger girls out there… Writers create them, Actors embody them and good girls fall for them. They have perfectly coiffed hair, leather jackets, an inner conflict, a sensitive side and a seriously sexy streak. Good girls want to go bad (thanks Cobra Star Ship…) with them and want to fix them at the same time.
In one of the most classic bad boy movies of the 80s, good Jewish girl Frances ‘Baby’ Houseman falls in love with South Philly’s Johnny Castle – the dance instructor at the Catskills resort where the Houseman family is vacationing. Some conflicts & Dirty Dancing later…Johnny says one of the most quoted movie lines – ‘Nobody puts Baby in the corner’. Daddy’s girls all around the world swooned. We’re all looking for that bad boy with a sensitive side to stand up to yet respect our fathers. And he can dance (and sing! Did you know, Swayze sang She’s Like the Wind for the Dirty Dancing soundtrack?).
Well, we good girls have lost a quintessential bad boy – Patrick Swayze. Tonight, Patrick lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. He has played so many bad boys – from Daryl in The Outsiders to Dalton in Road House, Bohdi in Point Break to Barker in The Beast… But to so many good girls (and bad girls) he will always be Johnny Castle (and a little bit Sam Wheat – the purest soul in Ghost).
josh
9/15/2009
So the Jewish connection here is that in Dirty Dancing, he played a dancer who hooked up with Jewish girl?
Grand Muffti
9/16/2009
Yeah, right. Nothing marks out a ‘bad boy’ like someone who is virtually obsessed with dancing and then uses it not to love and leave but to snag a girlfriend from the better side of the tracks. We all know that from such representations of ‘bad boys’ as Grease and that one about the Jets and the other guys who dance and sing a bunch…
Muffti is pretty sure that Swayze could have been in a movie about a man from an urban environment who clipped coupons and would call him a ‘bad boy’…