Word: theresa
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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...
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...
...effort that went into Goodbar was exhausting. "We all got so sick of me, day after day," Keaton remembers. A residue of Theresa stayed with Keaton after each day's shooting. "The parts where I had to be bitchy were hard to dismiss. I would go home feeling really rotten...
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...
Brooks and Keaton changed the character of Theresa perceptibly. Author Rossner described a chilly, rather unpleasant woman, and Keaton's Theresa is likable and warm, especially in her relationship with her sister, played by Tuesday Weld. So questions arise. Is Theresa too solid to be believable later as the victim of her own alienation? Does the humor she shows reflect too much sanity? Worse, does it reflect too much Annie Hall...