Word: theresa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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 delivers a flawless performance in her first leading role...
Reflecting her feverishly Catholic upbringing, Theresa feels a strong humanist obligation that is met by her line of work, teaching deaf children in a New York elementary school. She singles out a black girl in the class named Amy to concentrate her care and affection on, a trying task that is compounded by the stand-offish attitude of Amy's hate-filled older brother. The scenes showing Theresa striving to win over Amy's trust number among the more poignant encounters in the film, giving the viewer a taste of Dunn's better side. But the effect is quickly...
Regrettably, the director largely abandons the altruistic thread in the narrative as he increasingly dwells on Dunn's plunge into the hedonist ethic. The repeated humiliation accorded Theresa by her handsome sexual swordsman (Richard Gere) is designed to serve as a counterpoint to the unrequited love showered on her by the enraptured James Morrissey (William Atherton), but the novelty of the contrast quickly wears off as the subjugation of Theresa becomes progressively uglier. She throws herself into cocaine-sniffing, prostituting herself for the thrill of the act, and blowing off Morrissey out of sheer spite. The schoolteacher identity is tossed...
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...
...structure of Rossner's novel in only one instance--by placing the murder at the end of the movie instead of at the beginning--and the film on balance suffers as a result. The director undoubtedly made this change for a specific reason; by saving the murder of Theresa until the final scene, Brooks was able to exploit the effective technique of timing a flashing strobe light in her 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...