Pauline Kael

“Gere has become capable and accomplished, but he doesn’t have what Debra Winger has (and she has it right to her fingertips)—the vividness of those we call “born” performers. As Paula, a girl who works in the local paper mill, she’s a completely different character from the flushed hot-baby she played in Urban Cowboy, but she hasn’t lost her sultirness or her liquid style. Paula’s tough-chick little-girl insolence plays off the avid look in her eyes that tellsyou she longs to make human contact—she’s daring you to trust her. And what may be the world’s most expressive upper lip (it’s almost prehensile) tells you that she’s hungrily sensual; when she’s trying to conceal her raw feelings, her hoarse voice, with its prcarious pitch, gives her away. (It helps that Debra Winger has kept her own nose; it’s straight with an aquiline hint—just enough to make her look strong and distinguished.) When Paula is nervy and impatient, you feel where her impulses come from. And when she’s desperate because she’s losing the man she loves you pull for her. You pull for her even if the premise that this is her only chance in life strikes you as hype and you have subversive thoughts about what kind of life she’ll have as a navy flier’s wife. Debra Winger makes you accept the important part: that Paula loves Zack, that she believes her life would be empty without him….

“….[I]t’s Debra Winger who holds the picture together—she makes you feel that there’s something burning inside her. And she looks different in every shot, which helps to keep your mind off the fact that her character doesn’t develop. The only time I cringed for her was in the poorly staged scene with Zack telling off a callous, cold-blooded girl friend of hers, and Paula rounding on the no-goodnik girl with a pitying “God help you.” (I’ve only seen Duse in a silent film, but I’d swear that even she couldn’t have brought off that line in that situation.) On the other hand, Hackford has enough howling effrontery to put over the big romantic number, when Zack, having recognized Paula’s true qualities, … carries her out [of the mill], as the other employees, misty-eyed, applaud. (Norma Rae prepared us: workers applaud in mills all the time.) A movie like this, in which no one is like anyone you know and everything is make up, can make you feel imaginary, too.”

Pauline Kael
The New Yorker, August 23, 1982
Taking It All In, 382-83

David Denby

“…. Paula, more honest and less desperate [than Lynette], makes love for pleasure rather than power. Damp hair askew, her face puffy with desire, Debra Winger, sitting astride Gere, is perhaps the most openly erotic actress ever to appear in mainstream Hollywood movies. If anything, Winger, working her mouth and tossing her hair in every shot, comes on too strong. Nothing else about her is as developed as her sensuality, and because she’s incomplete, she seems a little lewd.”

David Denby
New York, August 9, 1982

Andrew Sarris

“…. For a time I lost sympathy with the Gere character for simultaneously behaving like a heel and getting self-righteously preachy about it. And for a time I wanted to kick the Debra Winger character for not telling him off. But I must say that when Gere finally did the right thing with boldness and dispatch, there was not a dry eye among all the women in attendance at the screening. The old dreams die hard, and I must report that I once saw the same female tears at a revival of an old Metro movie in which no-good, irresponsible Clark Gable shows up to rescue a somewhat tarnished and somewhat pregnant Jean Harlow from prison. That Gere and Winger can evoke memories of Gable and Harlow is a tribute to the relentlessly grown-up sexuality they have incarnated through their admittedly uneven careers, in an age dominated on screen by childish diversions.”

Andrew Sarris
Village Voice, August 10, 1982

notes

need to put postscript on sarris
need to extrapolate thomson
etc