LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR 1977 lecinemadreams.blogspot.com /2014/07/looking-for-mr-goodbar-1977.html
In hindsight, it seems coincidental and full of foreboding that both Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Saturday Night Fever were released within months of each another at the tail end of 1977 (October and December, respectively). These films brought a somber, reflective conclusion to a year which began with the release of George Lucas' escapist blockbuster Star Wars. No one could have known it at the time, but Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Saturday Night Fever sounded the dissonant, disco-beat death-knell tolling the end of the '70s and the demise of the sexual revolution. The looming specter of AIDS only serving to make Looking for Mr. Goodbar's dispiriting linking of sex and death feel positively prescient. Both of these films embodied attitudes which stood as barbed provocation to the 1970s in general, and the Utopian promise of sexual liberation in particular. The hopeful Diane Keaton as Theresa Dunn assurance that drugs, free love, sexual exploration, feminism, group therapy, hedonism, the new morality, and porno-chic were the self-fulfillment remedy for the oppressive restrictiveness of the past. Meanwhile, on a somewhat minor, but no less catastrophic cultural scale cinematically-speaking, the blockbuster success of Star Wars signaled the waning days of major movie studios showing any interest in making mature, challenging films like Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
1/12
When, in 1976, I saw Martin Scorsese’s trenchant urban nightmare Taxi Driver, I thought then that I had seen the most depressing film the '70s had to offer. Clearly I hadn’t reasoned on what 65-year-old writer/director Richard Brooks (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , In Cold Blood) had up his sleeve in bringing Judith Rossner’s controversial 1975 bestseller Looking for Mr. Goodbar to the screen. It was, without a doubt, the feel-bad movie of 1977.
Inspired by the gruesome 1973 real-life murder of New York schoolteacher/singles bar habitué Roseann Quinn, Brooks’ Looking for Mr. Goodbar is part opaque character study, part sociosexual thriller. It chronicles (with provocative moral ambiguity), the confused emancipation/dissociation of Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton): gifted teacher of deaf children by day, by night, pill-popping, singles bar-hopper salving her scars—literal and psychological—through submersion in the twilight world of detached, casual-sex encounters with anonymous, increasingly unsavory partners.
2/12
Theresa’s through-the-looking-glass (darkly) journey is largely a reactive one. Her romantic skepticism, a result of an over-idealized fling with an emotionally-abusive college professor (Alan Feinstein); her lack of desire for children, a dual response to her sister’s multiple abortions and her own fear of passing on congenital scoliosis. Her determined need for independence is most assuredly a backlash against the stifling life options proffered by her bellicose father (Richard Kiley) who would have Theresa settle down with a nice Catholic boy, cranking out one baby after another like her kid sister Brigid (Laurie Prange).
That Theresa’s emancipation ultimately takes the form of a paradoxical dual existence—"Saint Theresa by day and swinging Terry by night”—signals not only her unresolved inner conflicts, but underscore a point I think is germane to the appreciation of Looking for Mr. Goodbar as something more complex and infinitely smarter than a simplistic moral cautionary tale about the dangers awaiting single women in the big, bad city.
It sheds light on the fact that the “New Morality” of the '70s did absolutely nothing to minimize or reconfigure the sexual double-standard. In spite of the newfound freedoms of the era, women were still viewed in terms of Madonna/whore. Their bodies and reproductive rights, open-forum landscapes for religious, politico-social debate; their very independence rendering them more vulnerable than ever as targets of male sexual aggression. By way of example: most movie critics at the time blamed Theresa's violent fate on her reckless behavior. As though death were a foregone conclusion or patriarchal retribution for the sexually promiscuous female. Many weighed in on how self-destructive the character was, or how she harbored a death wish, but I don't recall a single critic placing the blame where it belonged: on her violent, mentally unstable rapist/murderer. That and a homophobic culture which encourages men to loathe anything feminine within themselves, and to gauge their masculinity on a scale of 3/12
sexual performance and aggressive behavior. When I saw Looking for Mr. Goodbar at the Regency Theater in San Francisco the first weekend of its opening, I was at the time just a sidelines observer to the sexual revolution. A 20-year-old virgin attending college in one of the most progressive cities in the world; I neither drank nor smoked, didn’t partake of drugs, and had yet to set foot in a disco. But the era was so alive and abuzz with change, excitement, and energy, even a Catholicreared, late-bloomer like me walked around in a near-constant haze of sensual distraction. Honestly, San Francisco in the '70s was so stimulating an environment, you would have sworn the city's fog was at least 50% amyl nitrate. Teaser ad from The Hollywood Reporter - 1977 That being said, I think it was precisely my sidelines status which contributed to my taking note of signs of battle fatigue within the sexual revolution. What had started out as a cultural movement of joy and selfdiscovery had, by 1977, transmogrified into something quite different. The sexual revolution had become a commoditized, cynically co-opted wave of sex merchandising and lifestyle branding that exposed the unspoken lie behind the rhetoric of sexual freedom and liberation. The lie (or perhaps, the naïve hope) being that sex was not intimacy, human physical contact bore no psychological or spiritual consequence, and Richard Gere as Tony Lo Porto that we as humans were not profoundly affected by its lack. What led me to this conclusion was the odd phenomenon of getting a good look at the faces of all the high-profile hedonists of my generation. John Holmes, Marilyn Chambers, Hugh Hefner, Linda Lovelace...they all looked like hell. The average 1970s swinger, toward the end of the decade tended to look like a hollowed-out pod person. Surely, something beyond alcohol and drug use accounted for the glazed, dead eyes staring out from the all those glossy sex magazines like Playboy, Viva, and Hustler. Was there a reason suburban swingers always looked so vacant and debauched? Why was it, whenever I passed by the doors of singles bars, none of the clientele ever looked particularly happy? If the new morality was as joyous and life-affirming as the pop culture media hype kept assuring me, why did its practitioners look so cheerless? Something told me that the enraptured lyrics (and moans) of all those disco songs weren't telling the whole story.
4/12
Although I hadn’t yet read the book, I knew enough about Looking for Mr. Goodbar and the incident that inspired it to be excited by the prospect of a contemporary film attempting to capture a cultural climate teeming with contrasts and contradictions. WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM One of my favorite things about the '70s is that it was such a self-reflective era in motion pictures. In fact, a frequent criticism leveled at American films at the time was that they, representative of the “Me Decade” in general, were in a rut of compulsive navel-gazing. Nearly always of the bleak, post-Watergate disillusionment sort. Looking for Mr. Goodbar was NOT the exception. When the relatively hang-loose permissiveness of the late '60s
The '70s: the era of sexual revolution or sexual dehumanization? Sex was more out in the open, but attitudes were still mired in sin, shame, and debasement
Tuesday Weld snagged a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her role as Katherine Dunn, a walking microcosm of '70s selfabsorption and the unfocused quest for the ideal existence
evolved into the self-conscious hedonism of the mid-'70s, it wasn’t difficult to detect a hint of desperation behind disco music’s over-emphatic exuberance. The search for fulfillment through sensual expression ofttimes gave off the sense of a prowl or hunt...but for what? With all the rampant drug and alcohol use, had sexual liberation, once thought to be the gateway to honest and open human interaction, become just another means of escaping reality? 5/12
To numb the pain of existence? To shelter our darker demons? To create a greater distance between people? Behind Looking for Mr. Goodbar's topicality and incendiary commingling of sex, guilt, and religion which so distracted critics at the time, the film is both artful and honest in its attempt to address many of the above-stated issues. More so than any film I've yet to see. Looking for Mr. Goodbar explores the fissures that began to show in the “If it feels good, do it” façade of the new morality. Tackling simultaneously: feminism, religious hypocrisy, the sexual double-standard, and Looking for Mr. Goodbar could have been subtitled: The Pleasure Paradox America’s intractable linking of sex and The Pleasure Paradox is the belief that happiness, when pursued violence. (that elusive Mr. Goodbar), remains ever beyond one's grasp When I first saw Looking for Mr. Goodbar, I knew right away it was something special. From the first saxophone strains initiating that gloriously unsettling title sequence, I was hooked. (The title sequence is like a short film in and of itself. It's a flowing montage of gritty black and white still shots capturing the vaguely dangerous allure of singles bars.) The entire cast, Diane Keaton especially, make something poignant and frighteningly real out of a story begging for sensationalism. Director Richard Brooks keeps to a palette motif of lights and darks; contrasting and paralleling the lighter scenes at the Dunn household (pitched to operatic levels) with the darkness of the emotional violence lurking on the sidelines of Theresa's solitary, but not lonely, independent life. The jarring use of sound and William Fraker's dark, dark, dark cinematography (I initially thought it was shot by Gordon Willis) contribute to making Looking for Mr. Goodbar one of the most powerful movies of the '70s. And make no mistake about it, this movie scared the bejesus out of me. The book was so popular, even if you hadn't read it you knew how it was going to end; but knowing is not the same as being prepared. The harrowing, near-unwatchable concluding moments of Looking for Mr. Goodbar left me feeling shell-shocked. That opening weekend, I still believe the reason I Richard Kiley as Theresa's no-patience-for-imperfections father remained in the theater to watch it a second time was simply because I was just too stunned to move out of my seat. Not everyone’s cup of tea for any number of reasons, Looking for Mr. Goodbar (dubbed Mr. Goodbarf by many left queasy by the film's violence) is for me an example of American self-reflective cinema at its best. Not the least because it’s an adult film that takes the risk of allowing itself to be misunderstood. I like that it doesn’t spell everything out and tell you how you should feel or react. It has a point of view and even an agenda, but it doesn't invite you to agree with it so much as it encourages you to just think about it. Some people dismiss the film as simplistic, others find it to be moralizing and misogynistic, and some just don't care for it because the topic is too depressing and sordid. No matter what people ultimately think, few find it to be forgettable. PERFORMANCES Because there were so many interesting actresses around in the '70s, it’s easy for me to forget that the decade was 6/12
largely a boys’ club devoted to buddy movies and misunderstood anti-heroes. By way of illustration, when the time
William Atherton as James (here washing the very knife that will play a role in the film's hellish denouement), the slightly creepy "nice guy" whose resentful response to being moved into the friendzone is to behave in an aggressive, possessively entitled manner every bit as unstable as the woman-hating "bad boys" he thinks he's better than. Sound familiar?
came to adapt Rossner’s woman-centric bestseller to the screen, only male directors were considered: Bernardo Bertolucci, Bob Fosse (I shudder at the thought), Mike Nichols, Sydney Pollack, and Roman Polanski.
LeVar Burton as Cap Jackson Looking for Mr. Goodbar marked the feature film debut of Burton, who became an overnight household name when the landmark miniseries, Roots aired earlier in the year
Closer to the reality of the '70s is that on those rare occasions when an actress was called upon to play something other than the girlfriend or male support-system (to get Goodbar, Keaton turned down the largely thankless Julie Christie role in Heaven Can Wait), the characters were so well-written (Katherine Ross–The Stepford Wives) and performances so superb (Jane Fonda–Klute), their prominence in my memory contradicts their actual scarcity. Looking for Mr. Goodbar is unequivocally my all-time favorite Diane Keaton movie. I actually think it’s the best work of her career. But, apropos of the dark/light contrasts of the Theresa Dunn character herself, I don’t think I would have fully appreciated her work here were it not for my having previously seen her in Annie Hall (released the same year). Onscreen almost constantly, Keaton's performance here is astonishingly raw. The range and depth of her characterization appears simultaneously natural and going-for-broke risk-taking. As screen heroines go (anti-heroine?) Keaton's Theresa Dunn is a true original; I've never seen a character like her in a film before or since. She's dimensional, complex, contradictory, funny, and operates under her own agency. For my money, Diane Keaton is simply staggering and was a very inspired choice for the part. It really makes you wish the actress had pursued more dramatic roles. 7/12
As for the character itself, I've always considered Theresa Dunn to be '70s cinema’s first anti-heroine: a female sexual outlaw and cultural nonconformist. And, like all rebels, she’s not always likable, smart, or rational–just a paradoxical, vulnerable human being struggling to make sense of the contradictions of her nature, deciding for herself what she wants to be, and accepting the risks (which, as it turns out, are considerable in our culture of normalized female-directed aggression) of choosing to live life on her own terms. Like a great many of her male counterparts Alan Feinstein as Professor Martin Engle in '70s cinema (portrayed by the likes of Richard Benjamin, Jack Nicholson, and Dustin Hoffman), Keaton's character delves into sex and drugs in a quest for self-discovery. And for once a woman’s exploration of her sexuality is presented in a manner both perceptive and honest enough to allow for the enjoyment of no-strings sex for its purely sensual appeal and the addictive nature of its ability to dull existential pain. Controversial and prone to dividing critics and fans alike into "love it/loath it" camps exclusively, I think the fact that Looking for Mr. Goodbar is such a downer of a film is the reason it never received the credit it deserved for the rather groundbreaking sincerity and seriousness with which it approached female sexuality. Anyone coming to Goodbar hoping for gauzy, soft-core porn cloaked in faux-feminist empowerment rhetoric "Get this into one of your two heads, the one that can think... I am my own girl! I belong to me!" (a la the popular Emmanuelle franchise) was in for a shock. Similarly, those who sought to see an allegory of a bad girl punished for her sins were left wanting, as well. If screenwriter Brooks is guilty of anything, it's in being too honest. Taking a tack different from the book, the Theresa of the film is not the self-loathing masochist with a death-wish Judith Rossner wrote about (and so many critics longed for in order to help explain away their discomfort with the story's theme);she is simply a flawed, perhaps emotionally damaged, woman who pays dearly for making one too many bad choices. By the way Rossner was said to have been displeased with the film, finding Keaton's character too "happy."
8/12
Because things end badly for the character of Theresa, Looking for Mr. Goodbar was seen by many as an antifeminist cautionary tale for single women. But I challenge that point of view as one laid at the feet of the viewer, not the film itself. I mean, things ended very badly for Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, but I don’t recall anyone calling that film a cautionary tale for hippie drug dealers.
Robert Fields as Rafe and Carole Mallory as Marvella Fans of The Stepford Wives will recognize these two swingers. She played a robotized housewife, he played chemist, Raymond Chandler, Katherine Ross' first love
THE STUFF OF FANTASY I only got around to reading Looking for Mr. Goodbar two years ago, an experience which left me appreciating even more what Richard Brooks' skill as a screenwriter (his first career) brought to the film version. To me, his work is a vast improvement over the source material, which I found too quick to place a big, glaring bullseye on Theresa's back. Richard Brooks, when faced with the challenge of adding making the character more sympathetic (aka: real) and extracting suspense from a story most everyone already knew the ending of, builds tension through the stylized application of a motif that's almost Biblical in its emphasis on argument of free will vs the paradox of fate. Brooks cannily uses innocuous events in the "light" parts of Theresa's life (as a teacher) to foreshadow the progressively violent trend of her "dark" nocturnal pursuits. At the time, so much was made of Theresa's "double life" (warmhearted teacher of the deaf by day/ emotionally detached bar hopper by night) as being a sure sign of her schizophrenic, self-destructive nature. A hetero-normative, gender-based double standard rearing its head once again. Looked at from a feminist or LGBTQ perspective, many individuals in the '70s, particularly gay people, lived lives of duality. Forced to behave one way during the day to keep their jobs, only free to be themselves on weekends or in the evenings at bars. From this point of view, Theresa's duality is less an indicator of a conflicted sexuality than it is representative of society's inability to recognize self-identified female sexuality beyond the confines of partnered/male validation (boyfriend, husband). 9/12
THE STUFF OF DREAMS "How do women still go out with guys when you consider that there is no greater threat to women than men? We’re the number one threat to women! Globally and historically, we’re the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women. You know what our number one threat is? Heart disease.” Louis CK “Every guy has a ‘crazy girlfriend’ story. Why don’t women have ‘crazy men’ stories? I never hear that. Why? Because if you have a crazy boyfriend, you’re gonna die.” Donald Glover
In assisting a deaf child to feel the forming of a word, Theresa has the girl hold her throat. A choking image that will be reenacted (horrifically) later.
Asked to come up with words that will produce enough air to move a feather, a child repeats the word "punch." When asked to come up with a less violent word, he responds with repeated shouts of "help!"
Looking for Mr. Goodbar was released decades before Sex and the City, so few cultural paradigms were in place through which audiences could process the notion of a sexually-active single woman living alone in a metropolitan city without resorting to blame-the-victim terminology. In discussing the film and Keaton's character, it was the rare reviewer who didn't resort to terms like self-loathing, nymphomaniacal, self-destructive, desperate, mentally ill, masochistic, unstable, depressive. The whole thing was quite ironic: while calling out Richard Brooks for making a morally reactionary sexual thriller, movie critics couldn't stop themselves from reaching the conclusion that promiscuity, drugs, and drinking were a certain fast-track to death for a single woman. A point which failed to 10/12
acknowledge that promiscuity, drugs, and drinking were cornerstones for a great many male coming-of-age films of the era, but nobody saw anything fatalistic in such "boys will be boys" behavior. On a similar note, Goodbar came out long before the concept of rape culture, so at no time could one find a journalist willing to devote even a paragraph to the castigation of the brutish, violent behavior of the men in the film. Nor could you find articles addressing our normalized attitudes on the matter of rape and other forms of femaledirected aggression in the age of sexual permissiveness. All I recall reading were a lot of human-interest articles about parents taking their daughters to see the film as a means (I can only suppose) of terrorizing them into celibacy. Of course, there were no stories about sons being taken to the film to teach them not to rape and abuse women.
Having overslept due to a night of partying, Theresa is greeted by an angry classroom. On the board is written, "You don't care!" The phrase: an inadvertent commentary on her desire for emotional disengagement in her private life,. The ominous, death-mask skull: a foreshadowing of the film's final image.
A scene reflective of our culture's inability to visualize women outside the scope of their relationship to men, Theresa has difficulty convincing a one-night stand that her desire for him to leave is born of a personal choice. Instead, he is convinced she is awaiting the arrival of a boyfriend or husband.
A lot has changed over the years, but not so much that a daringly mature film like Looking for Mr. Goodbar doesn't have something relevant to say to contemporary audiences. As stated earlier, it's a film that begs to be rediscovered and reevaluated in terms broader than the lazy label of "cautionary tale" has afforded it. It's an unpleasant film, to be sure, but an honest one. Perhaps even a bit too honest. But it's an inarguably important entry 11/12
from a decade when the objective of major motion pictures wasn't always to placate and pacify, but to get us to think. Unfortunately, I'm still looking for Looking for Mr. Goodbar...at least until the day Paramount decides to finally release it on DVD.
Tom Berenger as Gary
Copyright Š Ken Anderson
12/12