Saturday Night Fever was another one of those movies for which it was possible to have mixed emotions. As a disco musical, it was terrific. As a social study inspired by Nik Cohn's excellent reportage in New York magazine, it struck me as exploitationally contrived. The heavier its scenes, the hollower they rang.
The movie is a success, and it is not possible to say whether it is because of or in spite of its sexuality and its ear-searing language. My hunch, admittedly delivered from the north side of the generation gap, is that they have hurt more than they have helped, not only because they often look and sound false so often, but because they work counter to the rough romanticism - and, ultimately, the determined aspiration-that fires the central figures.
What makes the movie work, beyond the easy musical appeal, is the attraction of its leads, John Travolta with his mock-Brando inarticulate charm, and Karen Lynn Gorney as the name-dropping and ambitious secretary who is tough all over but a scared and vulnerable girl-child inside.
Somehow, watching, you had the feeling that the writer and the director knew more about her inner and outer life than the disco king's. He is a symbol, shiny and superficial as hair spray; she is a biography. His charm is beguiling and the limitations are in the conception, not the performance. She, with her see-through poses and pretensions, takes the audience from amusement to recognition to sympathy, and she is very winning indeed.
The murmurs of "Tara" in the movie's occasional quiet moments suggest that there are those among the watchers who know Gorney as the original repressed and guilt-rideen Tara from four years' worth of the TV soap opera All My Children.
That steel-edged Borough of Brooklyhn accent, which on screen seemed as much a part of her as her chromosomes, is much less pronounced during cocktail hour in the Cafe Swiss, but it is still a surprise to find that she grew up only a few blocks away on Alta Drive in Beverly Hills(...)
(...)She went off to the High School of Performing Arts in New York, then studied acting and took a degree at Carnegie-Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh. She also has a master's degree from Brandeis.
She'd done a good deal of regional theatre in and around Boston and was set to do a play there that she had written when All My Children and its promise of regular nourishment beckoned.
Her performance in "Saturday Night Fever" was thus neither a happy accident nor a piece of clever type-casting, although, like Jon Voight's in "Midinight Cowboy", it has a regional authenticity that seemed (incorrectly) to be beyond the reach of impersonation.
While one indelible role does not make a career in today's movies- John Voight has had hell's own time finding a match for the cowboy- it could well be that her gifts and her training, her particular questings and her mix of force and sensitivity make her an actress for her times, as, say, the Julie Christie of "Billy Liar"and "Darling" was for hers.