Word: dunne
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Richard Brooks has made so many crude miscalculations in adapting Judith Ressner's bestselling novel to the screen that it is surprising that he mustered the wisdom to pick Diane Keaton as his star. In the role of Theresa Dunn, a Catholic schoolteacher who cruises singles bars at night, Keaton is everything the rest of this movie is not: provocative, affecting, scary. She creates a heroine who is at once sexual aggressor and victim, lady and tramp, and she relentlessly savages most pat notions about the nature of womanhood. It is a spectacularly daring performance whose meaning sadly eludes...
...Richard (In Cold Blood) Brooks-should decide to bring this trash-posing-as-fiction to the screen also shows at once a keen eye for the commercial and a readiness to pursue his art within the constraining framework of a depressing narrative. In taking on a character like Theresa Dunn as the focal point of his film, Brooks has confirmed an affinity for the dark underside of the individual initially suggested by his adaptation of Truman Capote's book on the massacre of a Kansas farm family. Such subject matter arouses doubts as to the director's artistic aspirations...
Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Diane Keaton plunges into a new area in her line of work--a leading role in a serious drama about a nympho working girl--and she can look back on the departure with satisfaction. Her masochistic Theresa Dunn rivals Keaton's technical excellence in portraying Annie Hall, but the character makes no claims upon our sympathy, despite all the vilification unloaded upon her by Dunn's succession of one-night lovers. Tuesday Weld provides an unmemorable contrast to Keaton as Dunn's capricious older sister Katherine, relying too heavily on the character's caricaturish wackiness...
Then there is Diane Keaton in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. As Theresa Dunn, Keaton dominates this raunchy, risky, violent dramatization of Judith Ressner's 1975 novel about a schoolteacher who cruises singles bars. Watching her is a shock for viewers who associate her shy and awkward manner with Annie Hall. She is on-screen for well over two hours while her character disintegrates in the direction of alienation and death...
Brooks and Keaton mulled over the character of Theresa Dunn, who teaches devotedly in a school for the deaf by day, and then, as "Terry," prowls for rough sex in the singles bars at night. Terry is frighteningly disconnected from any feeling that lasts longer than the time required for nerve ends to stop tingling. She goads men and feels invulnerable...