Word: travoltas
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...acting skills will not be so sorely tested. "I'd decided not to do the part," Travolta confesses. "But then I reconsidered. I thought, what's wrong with doing a light musical? Brando did it." Clearly, this is a boy who likes to run on a fast track...
File Carr's appraisal for the moment under "glamour" and consider all that De Niro-Pacino-Hoffman talk going around as so much well-intentioned rooting interest. The movie star Travolta most clearly calls to mind is Montgomery Clift. Travolta may lack the depth of Cliffs gifts, but he has much the same quicksilver charm. He too can give an audience the sense of immediate but always fragile intimacy, of shared secrets, of private truths known without speaking...
...Moment to Moment. "And how sexy too. The sensitivity and the sexuality are very strong. It's as if he has every dichotomy?masculinity, femininity, refinement, crudity. You see him, you fall in love a little bit." Adds Saturday Night Live Producer Lome Michaels, whose barbed-wire comedy show Travolta keeps promising to host: "John is the perfect star for the '70s. He has this strange androgynous quality, this all-pervasive sexuality. Men don't find him terribly threatening. And women, well...
There is a whole future in that ellipsis, which does not take away an inch from Travolta's interpretive skills. A closer look at Fever will reveal both an actor who works his tail off and a man with a sharp eye for stage business. As Tony Manero, he strides down that block of Bay Ridge swinging a can of paint like a talisman, and when he stops for a snack at the corner pizza stand he orders two slices, then eats them one piled right on top of the other...
Good and clever, but Travolta can cut much deeper than that. Trying out a new step with his ideal dance partner, he provokes an admiring question ("Did you make that step up yourself?") and a neat reply: "Yeah . . . No. I saw it on television . . . then I made it up." The modification, and the contradiction, were Travolta's invention, and they say a lot about Tony Manero's stubborn pride and restless insecurity...