Teenage Turmoil

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

DIRTY DANCING

Until they invented the counterculture, teenagers of the early '60s like Baby Houseman (Jennifer Grey) had to make do with just culture. So she gets three weeks with her family at a resort in the Catskills. Bo-o-o-ring! Baby's only hope is that Johnny (Patrick Swayze), the lower-class hunk who teaches dancing, may notice her. In a picture that never makes a move the audience has not anticipated two scenes back, wish soon becomes reality. Johnny initiates Baby first into his erotically charged (if anachronistic) dance style, then into the joys of sex.

Grey and Swayze are an attractive couple, and there is a good rush to Director Emile Ardolino's staging of the dance sequences. If the ending of Eleanor Bergstein's script is too neat and inspirational, the rough energy of the film's song and dance does carry one along, past the whispered doubts of better judgment.