Cult Cinema: Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) - Reviewed

Images Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Old Hollywood veteran Richard Brooks, best known for such genre classics as Blackboard Jungle, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elmer Gantry and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, was already a renowned and well regarded industry master by the time he arrived on his searing and unforgettable adaptation of Judith Rossner’s 1975 novel of the same name Looking for Mr. Goodbar.  

Loosely inspired by a true crime story involving the death of a schoolteacher in 1973, this intensely director-driven jet-black masterwork of bleak and realistic 70s cinema was one of two of actress Diane Keaton’s most memorable performances as an actress in a role you’ve never seen her in before or since.  While most of her pictures now are synonymous with user friendly romantic comedies for nice old ladies, there was a time when Keaton in the prime of her youth dove naked and unafraid into the depths of confrontational, disturbing filmmaking that starts out on a note of unease before gradually working its way towards a jugular bite.  I never knew she had it in her to be in a film that leaves scars.

 
Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton) is a young schoolteacher in Chicago who after a brutal childhood involving spine surgery for scoliosis that leaves a permanent scar on her backside and years of a repressive domineering upbringing by her Polish-Irish Catholic parents (a stunning Richard Kiley and Priscilla Pointer), she decides to leave home.  Securing an apartment in her older sister Katherine’s (Tuesday Weld) flat, she takes up a job teaching deaf children during the day.  But at night she leads a double life cruising seedy bars and disco dance clubs looking for men she can take home and sleep with, in stark contrast to her squeaky-clean image of the nice schoolteacher. 
 
During her nightly odysseys into the dark in carnal craving, she crosses paths with a hotshot womanizer named Tony (Richard Gere) who becomes the first real threat to her stability, giving her cocaine and a Quaalude to sleep it off only to show up late to an unruly classroom.  Later still she meets a welfare caseworker named James (William Atherton from Ghostbusters) who seems like the right person for her approving parents and a possible candidate for marriage.  However, he won’t have sex with her as he objects to her promiscuous love life and over time he too becomes something of an abusive threat to her.  Not long after, Theresa begins accelerating her nightly sexual encounters with increasingly older, violent men in what seems to be a self-destructive downward spiral.

 
Somber and deeply disturbing from start to finish and perhaps one of the most unerotic films ever made chock full of nubile flesh and carnality onscreen, Looking for Mr. Goodbar announces itself out of the gate as a horror film that will only invariably get so much worse as it goes on.  Anchored by a powerful, brilliant and somehow utterly fearless performance from Diane Keaton who is the last person you’d ever expect in this kind of role, the ensemble piece is something of a condemnation of free love and sexual liberation suggesting like William Friedkin’s homoerotic Cruising nine times out of ten this lifestyle will end in tragedy.  Something of a character study as well as a critique of how such a lifestyle can and might kill you, the film makes a strong contender for a companion piece to Bob Fosse’s equally downbeat and horrific Star 80 as far as movies that literally proceed to murder and leave their audiences for dead.
 
One of the strengths of the film involves its precise and key editing, utilizing still photos for flashbacks of her childhood surgery to highly disturbing effect that, yes, rivals the medical exams in Friedkin’s The Exorcist.  Then there’s the use of daydreaming and premonitory fears playing out in Theresa’s head, like when she fantasizes about jumping into bed with her college professor only to have it cut back to reality.  Later still she fears her nighttime ruse will be discovered by the public and destroy her reputation, replete with a police raid and arrest that, again, turns out to be just in her head.  

The movie is constantly jolting us back and forth in this way so we’re really not always sure if our feet are resting on firm or fertile ground.  Then there’s the use of strobing which seems to have found its way decades later into the jolting, unforgettable finale of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.  The technique was in its infancy in movies, only really being used a couple years later in Alien, but here its presence plays like a bad omen, a harbinger of things to come.
 
Visually the film is stunningly precisely composed, often shot in dimly lit smokey bars and clubs in soft focus by William A. Fraker who was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on the film and he captures the stark differences between her upstanding daytime image and the neon drenched netherworlds of the sex clubs and porno theaters she mingles in an out of looking and searching endlessly for satisfaction to an insatiable impulse.  

Artie Kane’s mournful, frankly depressing original score paints a picture of an unhappy woman wallowing in a Hell entirely of her making, though a chunk of the film’s soundtrack consists of needle drops including but not limited to Boz Scaggs, The Commodores, Bill Withers and Diana Ross, making this soundtrack album somewhat interchangeable with Boogie Nights’ two soundtrack albums.
 
Acting wise, this is a firestorm spearheaded by an actress which, frankly, I didn’t know she had it in her.  People who only know her recent cutesy vanilla romcom roles are in for a brutal, furious shock.  Not only does she use every aspect and feature of her body in a very physically demanding performance of this sex starved woman, she conjures up some dark emotional weathers that are startling to behold once unleashed.  

Take for instance her locking of horns with her dominant but devoted father and the two spar in a fierce shouting match.  Seeing Keaton in the heat of fury reminded me of Beatrice Straight’s still searing Oscar win for Network as a beleaguered wife who lays down the law with her cheating husband played by William Holden.  From her angry eyes to her resolute delivery of her lines, you feel this woman’s passion and it’s a testament to Keaton’s uncharted abilities as an actress.  A shame she hung her hat in recent years as she is sheer fire in this film.

 
Also strong are the supporting performers including but not limited to Tuesday Weld in a Best Supporting Actress nominated performance as Theresa’s wild floozy sister, Richard Gere’s hotheaded white fanged go-getting player, William Atherton again playing a schmuck fresh off of The Day of the Locust and even a brief first-time screen debut from Brian Dennehy.  Richard Kiley in particular delivers an enraging performance as Theresa’s father who may or may not have had a hand in the fostering of his daughter’s downward spiral.  Last but not least is a very young Tom Berenger whose role here as a troubled gay hustler had to have played a part in Oliver Stone’s casting of him as the battle-scarred Barnes in his Vietnam War drama Platoon.
 
Released theatrically in 1977 against other tough competitors such as Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Looking for Mr. Goodbar like the novel before it became a commercial success.  Costing around $2.5 million, a low budget effort, the film took in $22.5 million and expanded into wide release.  Briefly in the #1 spot before going back to Star Wars, the film was one of two major breakthrough performances for Diane Keaton that year, the other being Annie Hall which she won the Academy Award for.  

The screen introductions for Richard Gere, LeVar Burton and Tom Berenger, the film launched many careers despite being among the director’s last great movies.  Serving as the inspiration for Frank Zappa’s Dancin’ Fool as well as name drops from Weird Al, Madonna and The Simpsons, Looking for Mr. Goodbar possessed that same uncompromising regard for carrying the story out logically rather than how audiences would want it as Friedkin’s The Exorcist or even further back Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs.
 
Raw, painful and like a wild animal’s claw slashing across the face, Looking for Mr. Goodbar despite the success and accolades sadly drifted back into obscurity and is mostly known to moviegoers now by reputation rather than actual viewing of the film.  A shame because like it or not, Brooks’ film led by Keaton’s brave and daring performance still has the power to shock and appall viewers and has lost none of its ferocity, melancholy or anger to time.  

A classy, ornate film about desultory sexual obsession and/or addiction, a true crime story with the names changed to protect the innocent, and a truly great performance from, yes, one of the industry’s most gifted actresses, Looking for Mr. Goodbar now on the streaming service Paramount+ has a chance to be recognized by modern filmgoers for the indefatigable, shocking masterpiece of 70s cinema from one of Old Hollywood’s most gifted purveyors that it is.  Few if any movies about self-destructive female sexual liberation have this kind of brass knuckled sucker punch emotional power.  One thing is for sure, this will stay with you for a really very long time.

--Andrew Kotwicki