Welcome to "Saturday Night At The Movies."

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's film is the 1987 romantic drama "Dirty Dancing".

It was directed by Emile Ardolino from a screenplay by Eleanor Bergstein.

"Dirty Dancing" starts Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Gray with the supporting cast that includes Jerry Orbach, Cynthia Rhodes, Jack Weston, and Jane Brucker.

The story takes place during the summer of 1963.

The Housemans, Jake, a physician, his wife, Marjorie, and his daughter's Lisa and Frances, known to everyone as Baby, are vacationing at Kellerman's Mountain House, an upscale resort in New York's Catskill Mountains.

While finding her way around, Baby overhears the owner, Max Kellerman, telling the waiters he's recruited from Ivy League schools to romance the visitors' daughters no matter what they look like.

Max also has unkind words for the resort's entertainment staff, most of them working class, and relegated to their own cabins far away from the guests.

Among the entertainers are dancers Johnny and Penny who perform a torrid Mambo as part of the evening's entertainment.

Baby is intrigued by Johnny, whose cousin Billy later sneaks her into a secret dirty dancing party just for the staff, where Baby briefly dances with Johnny.

The next evening, Baby finds Johnny's dance partner Penny sobbing in the kitchen.

Penny is pregnant by one of the waiters, Robbie, a medical student from Yale who refuses to do anything to help her.

Without telling him the reason, Baby borrows money from her father to help Penny.

But Penny doesn't wanna leave Johnny without a partner for their regular appearance at another resort nearby.

Baby volunteers to serve as Johnny's partner instead, but Johnny isn't sure Baby can dance well enough to replace Penny.

Over the following days, Baby and Johnny work long hours together to prepare for their performance, and their feelings for each other begin to reveal themselves.

The setting for "Dirty Dancing" is one of the many Catskill resorts that were vacation destinations for Jewish families from New York City from the 1920s to the 1960s.

In the 20s and into the 30s, many vacation hotels refused to accept Jewish visitors and even advertised their accommodations allowed no Hebrews or consumptives.

This created the need for an alternative for Jewish families hoping to escape the city during the hot summer months.

The Catskills, a region of about 250 square miles, served by two railroad lines, offered city residents beautiful scenery, cool temperatures in July and August, and a chance to commune with nature.

The resorts offered Friday evening and holiday religious services, kosher cooking, and the opportunity to meet and mingle with new people or perhaps the same people if visitors returned year after year.

It was a place for men to make business connections, for women to make friends, and for young people to meet each other and perhaps find romance.

Like today's cruise ships, the Catskills Resorts were famous for two things; the food and the entertainment.

Jewish immigrants and their children who had memories of suffering hunger were attracted by the abundance of fresh food in places where the slogans seemed to be too much is never enough.

In fact, the Catskills became known as the Borscht Belt, a homage to the cold beat soup that was a staple of its cuisine.

The entertainment included music and dancing, but also, at the bigger hotels, plays and musical stage productions.

There were various sorts of athletic events, competitions and contests.

Most resorts also had tummlers, entertainers who would keep things busy and encourage audience participation or sometimes just perform stunts or otherwise stir things up.

Jerry Lewis and Mel Brooks, among many others, got their start as tummlers in the Catskills.

At the height of the Catskills popularity as a vacation venue, as many as 500 resorts cater to the needs of visitors of various incomes.

The resorts staff from different sorts of entertainers to servers, to cooks, to maids, to groundskeepers, came from the surrounding region and worked hard to keep their guests comfortable well fed and entertained.

And sometimes, as tonight's movie reveals, things got complicated.

"Dirty Dancing" was one of those films whose eventual audience and popularity surprised almost everyone involved.

Executives at Vestron Pictures, who produced "Dirty Dancing" as the company's first feature film, were convinced it was going to be a flop.

One advised after seeing it, "Burn the negative and collect the insurance."

Since the expected audience was teenagers, Vestron tried to work out a promotional deal with Clearasil, but the acne medication manufacturers were unhappy with Dirty Dancing's adult content.

Vestron executives initially planned to release the film briefly in theaters and then release it on home video, the company's primary business venture.

When the film appeared in theaters, reviews were mixed, but then, much to everyone's surprise, it turned out "Dirty Dancing" appealed more to adult audiences than teenagers and those who saw it were likely to see it more than once.

Word of mouth led the film to break the $10 million mark within 10 days.

Within seven months of its release, it had earned 63 million in the US, and became one of the highest grossing films of 1987, with global earnings of $170 million.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the film was also credited with boosting enrollment in dance classes in the late eighties.

"Dirty Dancing" was the number one video rental in 1988, as well as the first movie to sell a million copies on video tape.

The soundtrack album spent 18 weeks on the Billboard 200 album sales chart and "[I've Had] The Time of My Life" hit number one of the pop charts and became a popular song to play at funerals.

The film spawned a stage musical in 2004, that later broke records in Sydney, London and New York.

In 2010, Jezebel critic Irin Carmon called the film the greatest movie of all time, and a great, brave movie for women with some subtle retrospectively sharp eyed critiques of class and gender.

The story in "Dirty Dancing" is bracketed by two speeches that put the film into a very specific historical and cultural context.

At its very beginning, Baby says in voiceover, "That was the summer of 1963, 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."

This speech evokes the idea that both Baby and the era she's talking about were much more innocent than what came after the assassination of JFK and the social upheaval represented by the Beatles, when Baby's nascent idealism and her devotion to her father seem sweet, but rather naive.

The other speech comes towards the end of the film when Max Kellerman is reminiscing with his band leader Tito about the changes at the resort over the years.

He says, "It's not the changes so much this time, it's that it all seems to be ending.

You think kids want to come with their parents and take Foxtrot lessons?

Trips to Europe, that's what the kids want.

22 countries in three days.

It feels like it's all slipping away."

And he was right.

After 1965, the cultural circumstances that had once allowed the Catskill Mountain Resorts to flourish changed forever and sent those same resorts into a steep decline.

By the mid nineties, over 300 resorts had closed forever.

In 1986, Grossinger's, one of the best known resorts, was closed for renovations and never reopened.

The last of the great resorts, The Concord, filed for bankruptcy in 1997 and closed a year later.

From their beginnings in the 1890s to their almost complete disappearance a century later, the Catskills Resorts that made up the Borsch Belt had a cultural impact that extended far beyond the families with happy memories of summers spent there.

The resorts nonstop entertainment and the anarchic antics of the tummlers created a specific style of humor that took its name from the region.

Borsch Belt humor featured puns and rapid fire jokes about bad luck, physical ailments, annoying relatives and nagging wives.

Comedians like Henny Youngman, Totie Fields, Rodney Dangerfield, Alan King and Joan Rivers went from the resorts to television programs like "The Ed Sullivan Show", bringing the Borsch Belt to the rest of mid-century America.

In fact, almost every Jewish comedian whose career began in the second half of the 20th century got started or frequently performed at the Catskills Resorts.

The Borsch Belts is reflected in the antics of Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis and Billy Crystal, and in the films of Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, among many others.

Borch Belt comedy was and remains one of the most distinctive and characteristic forms of American humor.

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night At The Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.