Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [162]
But it was another piece of Hollywood pop that really animated her that Christmas season—John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever, with John Travolta as Tony, a working-class Italian-American kid from Brooklyn who lives out his fantasies on the dance floor of a disco hall called the Odyssey. For Pauline it was a fascinating social document, a look at “how the financially pinched seventies generation that grew up on TV attempts to find its own forms of beauty and release.” Pauline loved the picture’s mise-en-scène: The scenes in the disco suggested “a TV-commercial version of Art Deco; the scenes there are vividly romantic, with the dancers in their brightest, showiest clothes, and the lights blinking in burning neon-rainbow colors, and the percolating music of the Bee Gees . . . These are among the most hypnotically beautiful pop dance scenes ever filmed.”
She was especially intrigued by Saturday Night Fever’s star:
There is a thick, raw sensuality that some adolescents have which seems almost preconscious. In Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta has this rawness to such a degree that he seems naturally exaggerated: an Expressionist painter’s view of a young prole.... His large, wide mouth stretches across his narrow face, and his eyes—small slits, close together—are, unexpectedly, glintingly blue and panicky. Walking down the street in his blood-red shirt, skintight pants, and platform soles, Tony moves to the rhythm of the disco music in his head. It’s his pent-up physicality—his needing to dance, his becoming himself only when he dances—that draws us into the pop rapture of this film.
One of the greatest mysteries of Hollywood in the 1970s is why it took the film industry so long to deal with the Vietnam War. Since the signing of the Paris Peace Accords and swift withdrawal of American troops in early 1973, the defining conflict of an entire generation had seldom surfaced onscreen. It was fitting that Jane Fonda, the Hollywood star most publicly associated with the antiwar movement, was the driving force behind the first major studio film in some time to take on the Vietnam experience at home.
Fonda often referred to Hal Ashby’s Coming Home in interviews as her “baby”—the movie she cared about more than any of the others she had made. She had been very frank in interviews about her difficulty getting cast in films ever since winning the Academy Award for Klute. In the mid-1970s, with the steady erosion of the American counterculture, the major studios were reluctant to take a chance on an actress whose views on the Vietnam War had been so unpopular with such a large sector of the public. The remnants of Nixon’s silent majority held Fonda in contempt, and the younger audience that had rallied behind her was no longer ablaze with the spirit of protest; many of those former activitists seemed battle-fatigued, eager to get on with their lives. With the lack of belief in institutions, which had cast a pall over the country since Watergate, Americans seemed to be pulling into themselves more than they had in years: The pursuit of private pleasure and prosperity was steadily dwarfing concern over the public good.
Because of this prevailing climate, there was some doubt that a drama about Vietnam’s effect on the home front would be able to capture an audience of any size. Coming Home, set in Los Angeles, involved Sally Hyde (Fonda’s character), the wife of a gung-ho marine officer (Bruce Dern) assigned to Vietnam. While her husband is away, she begins working as a volunteer in a veterans’ hospital. There she meets Luke (Jon Voight), a former high school classmate; once a star athlete, he’s now a paraplegic. The two of them begin an affair, and gradually, Sally’s consciousness is raised—the times begin to change her, in ways that will ultimately destroy her marriage.
Ashby