Word: mr
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Indeed Tony's coital bouts with the heroine provide Looking for Mr. Goodbar with its few insightful scenes. When this couple make violent love, we can begin to understand the complex erotic passions that draw Theresa to her self-destructive double life. The rest of the film's brutality-its harsh language, its vicious climactic murder scene-are merely heavyhanded manifestations of Brooks' moral-mongering. The audience, not to mention Diane Keaton and Judith Rossner, deserve greater rewards in exchange for the punishment. - Frank Rich
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...