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The 1970s Mastodon Mega Movie Poll
First Round. Match-up #2. Result: All the President’s Men 83% - 17% The Great Gatsby. Votes 63 - 13.
Many thanks for your votes and boosts.
Match-up #3. Please vote for your favourite movie below 
If necessary, ties will be broken by the American Film Institute’s ranking as determined by their jurors’ votes in 2007.
Saturday Night Fever’s low budget ($3.5 million) meant that most of the actors were relative unknowns. Many of them were recruited from New York's theatre scene. For more than forty percent of the cast it was their film debut. The only actor in the cast with an established name was John Travolta.
Grease. Elvis Presley was considered for the role of The Teen Angel, but died before production. Henry Winkler, star of Happy Days, turned down the role of Danny Zuko for fear of being typecast.
Saturday Night Fever is actually rated #31 by the AFI for movies made in the 1970s. Our voters nominated Grease, so the match-up was obvious. I must confess, they are not my type of film. However, they are culturally important and so deserve a place in our poll, I reckon. I’m interested to see how many votes the movies gather between them. Maybe they hold special memories for some people 
Thank you for your thoughts on these movies. All very interesting. A footnote: in 2010, Saturday Night Fever was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the U S National Film Registry. In 2020, Grease was selected for preservation in the U S National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". It’ll be interesting to see how they’ll fair in our polls
@HannahHowe What's interesting to me is that Jeff Conaway (Kenickie) had actually played Danny on Broadway. John Travolta was obviously the bigger star at this point so he not only got the lead role, he got to sing lead on what had originally been Kenickie's star turn in the show ("Greased Lightning").
@HannahHowe I'll also be interested to see how this plays out. I don't think there's any contest here as far as which is the better film. I know "Grease" was a box office and cultural phenomenon but it's not really that good (and now I've said that, I should probably start gearing up to get yelled at :)).
The Blind Fraggle @HannahHowe Believe it or not I've still never seen Saturday Night Fever.
@HannahHowe The Unspooled podcast did a really interesting re-reevaluation of Grease and why it is groundbreaking in a number of ways. As a feminist of a certain age the transformation of Sandy always rankled, but but others saw it differently. I don't believe I've seen SNF since it came out – and every time I think I should give it another go, I don't.