Word: goodbar
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Judith Rossner, the author of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, clearly understood the appeal of this kind of masochistic allegory, as the best-seller success that greeted her pulp novel demonstrated. That 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...
...Brooks. Her past appearances in various Woody Allen films have left American audiences with a very tangible image of the actress: an often capricious yet charming woman who generally musters the strength to resist the prodigal nebbish's amorous advances. Keaton has tackled a character in Looking for Mr. Goodbar who is virtually an antithesis of her previous roles. Her Theresa Dunn is a willing woman, to put it charitably, a closet nympho who repeatedly allows herself to be sacrificed to the discredited altar of machismo. Although the context in which she finds herself working is an unfamiliar one, Keaton...
True to the two-sided nature of the leading character, Looking for Mr. Goodbar has a schizoid quality all its own. The first half of the movie eclipses the ensuing 60 minutes in restraint and insight: indeed. Brooks fleshes out Dunn so well that he cannot avoid the unfortunate fate of his concluding scenes smacking of an anticlimax. The film initially focuses on a compelling dynamic at work in the psyche of Dunn, a wrenching struggle between two seperate identities that cannot be accommodated within the fragile limits of her unstable emotions...
Looking for Mr. Goodbar is very much an American movie. Opening with a montage of black-and-white stills of Theresa, the film relies heavily on crisp quips to furnish some badly needed levity to the story, and Brooks is not averse to using quick cutting from scene to scene to keep the action moving. One-liners like "Confession is good for the soul but it's bad for sex" are supposed to pass for slick dialogue, and they do succeed in eliciting the nervous chuckles, but the script seems to have been written with no higher purpose in mind...
...bedroom with the rapidly mounting and then slowing heartbeat of the victim. In so doing, however, Brooks traps himself in to the quandary of suddenly thrusting the murderer into the narrative without any kind of introduction. A vagrant cowboy type appears out of nowhere, picks up Theresa at Goodbar's and slays her--all within the brief span of a few minutes, asking the viewer to bite off far more than he can be expected to chew. All of which suggests a film that the director suddenly became bored with, a feeling that most audiences of Looking for Mr. Goodbar...