20 Most Perfect Scenes In Cinema History

Dirty Dancing is a film in which innocence and experience are constantly defining themselves against one another.

Set in the summer of 1963, the story is a fairytale romance overlaid onto period-set melodrama. Frances ‘Baby’ Houseman is a gauche, middle class teenage tomboy who embarks on a sweet affair with the working class dance instructor at her family’s vacation resort.

Come the ending, her holiday romance exposed to cold, harsh reality, Baby faces heading home in disgrace. That is, until her Disney prince returns to take her hand for one more dance, dismissing her father with that iconic “nobody puts Baby in a corner”.

The film’s dance scenes tend to switch between diegetic and extradiegetic music, depending on whether the scene is a set-piece or a montage. The music played within the story is period-appropriate to avoid jarring anachronism, while the music accompanying scenes tends to be contemporary.

The feelgood finale of Dirty Dancing is the triumph of the fairytale over reality. (I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life is an almost defiantly eighties pop tune, yet it’s used in a diegetic context. This deliberate clash heightens the impression of romantic unreality: this could easily be Frances’ daydream in the family car on the way back to dreary New York.