Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977)
Directed by Richard Brooks

Film Review

Looking for Mr. Goodbar was the last important film from Richard Brooks, one of American cinema's great auteurs and the director of such classics as Blackboard Jungle (1955), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and In Cold Blood (1967).  Adapted from a fact-inspired novel of the same title by Judith Rossner, the film provides a dark commentary on the sexual revolution of the 1970s, although it is often criticised (perhaps with some justification) for its overtly moralistic tone.   The minor shortcomings in the screenplay are redeemed by Brooks's direction which never fails to be less than inspired throughout the film and is particularly inventive in its dramatic stroboscopic climax, which is perhaps the most viscerally shocking ending of any American film of the 1970s.

Diane Keaton won an Oscar for her role in Annie Hall, a film that was released in the same year as Looking for Mr. Goodbar.  This seems perverse given that Keaton's performance in the latter film is far more nuanced and compelling, possibly the finest in her career.  The character that she plays in Brooks's film is one of tremendous contrasts and a challenge for an actress, but Keaton makes her believable and sympathetic, something which renders the film's final sequence almost unbearable to watch.  Keaton's is not the only great performance the film has to offer.  Richard Gere and Tom Berenger remind us how formidable their acting talent once was at the start of their remarkable careers - here, both render their slightly stereotypical characters harrowingly believable and give the film its required aura of menace.   Some fine supporting contributions from Tuesday Weld, William Atherton and Richard Kiley add to the film's authenticity and hypnotic power.

Often categorised as an erotic thriller (a kind of Emmanuelle meets Psycho), Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a far more substantial film than this lazy epithet would suggest.  Despite its somewhat puritanical subtext, it functions as a cogent, well-observed examination of the moral confusion of the 1970s which was caused by the sexual revolution and the failure by society to reconcile traditional values with the new freedoms that this brought about, for both men and women.  It was an era that is unique in western society, a brief period of obsessive self-gratification and abandonment between the austerity of the 1950s and terror of the AIDS pandemic that came in the 1980s.  What the film shows is that freedom is entirely illusory, and that moral constraints are not only desirable but essential for the fulfilment of the individual.  More than three decades on, Looking for Mr. Goodbar continues to have a profound resonance and is dated only by its hip 1970s soundtrack.

Film Synopsis

Theresa Dunn is a university student who is physically and emotionally scarred by surgery she underwent in childhood.  As she battles against her poor self-esteem and the righteous tyranny of her Catholic father, she begins an illicit love affair with her teacher, a married man.  When her lover calls an end to the relationship, Theresa embraces the sexual revolution and begins cruising the city's seedier bars in search of one-night stands.  By day she is a respectable, dedicated teacher of deaf children; by night she pursues a life of reckless hedonism, subjecting herself to increasingly dangerous sexual encounters.  She has no time for the romantically minded welfare office who becomes infatuated with her, even though he is a paragon of virtue compared with most of the men she lures to her bed.  Theresa begins to realise the perilous nature of her existence when she breaks up with a hot-tempered Italian, Tony Lo Porto.  Even though she fears threatened by Tony, she finds it impossible to change her lifestyle...