Looking for Mr. Goodbar (film)

Theresa Dunn, a young schoolteacher in an unnamed American city, experiences her sexual awakening while searching for excitement outside her ordered life. While in college, she lives with her repressive Polish-Irish Catholic parents and suffers from severe body image problems following a childhood surgery for scoliosis that left a large scar on her back. She finds out that her scoliosis is congenital and that her aunt Maureen had the same condition and committed suicide. As a result, Theresa is reluctant to have children. Meanwhile, her beautiful older sister, Katherine, has left her husband and embarked on a wild lifestyle involving multiple affairs, a secret abortion, recreational drug use, and a short-lived marriage to Barney, a Jewish man. Theresa finds first love and loses her virginity to her much older, and married, college professor, Martin Engle. He ends their affair just before her graduation, leaving Theresa feeling used and lonely. She takes a job teaching deaf children and proves to be a gifted and caring teacher. With Katherine's encouragement, she moves into an apartment in Katherine's building. She frequents a bar at night where she meets Tony Lopanto, a charming but vain Italian-American. She takes Tony to her apartment, taking cocaine with him and sleeping with him. Tony leaves in a hurry and gives her a Quaalude pill to counteract the cocaine. This causes her to oversleep, and she arrives very late for work the next day, angering her employer and students. Tony then disappears for a long while. Through her job, Theresa meets and dates an Irish-American welfare caseworker, James Morrissey. Her parents approve, seeing him as a potential husband for Theresa. However, the couple do not have sex because James wants a traditional courtship and a monogamous relationship. Theresa sees this as stifling her freedom. Although James initially seems nice, he becomes controlling and disrespectful. Meanwhile, Theresa begins to go out to marginal places and has sex with strangers, often older men. Tony returns and acts as if nothing had happened. He barges in on Theresa while she is with another man and chases him away. Tony becomes controlling and abusive, and Theresa discovers that he is a street hustler. She breaks up with him, but he stalks and harasses her. After imagining what could happen if Tony were to turn her in to the police as revenge, Theresa gathers up all of the drugs in her apartment and flushes them down the toilet. With the New Year approaching, she resolves to turn over a new leaf and take control of her life. On New Year's Eve, she meets Gary Cooper White in a bar and cajoles him into helping her avoid James. Gary has been living with his gay lover George Price but lies to Theresa, telling her that he has a pregnant wife in Florida. When they are in bed together at her apartment, Gary is unable to achieve an erection. Theresa tells him that it is okay if they do not have sex, but Gary misinterprets this as questioning his sexuality. In a rage, he attacks her, rapes her, and stabs her to death. ==Cast==

Casting notes Looking for Mr. Goodbar introduced LeVar Burton and Tom Berenger, as men whom the protagonist Theresa Dunn encounters. The film is also the first major screen credit for both Richard Gere and Brian Dennehy. ==Production==

For the sex scenes, Richard Brooks closed the set to all but essential crew. Diane Keaton still had difficulty the first time she was required to appear naked. When she heard Richard playing a Johann Sebastian Bach record during lunch, she asked if he could play the record during her scene. "Diane is so shy," he said later. "She could only do a nude scene if she was playing to the music. She couldn't play to a man. I think Bach would have been pleased." ==Release==

Looking For Mr. Goodbar grossed $1.5 million from 110 theaters in its opening weekend. Variety listed the film at number one at the US box office for the week based on their sample of 20-22 cities; however, Star Wars grossed more for the weekend. After 16 days, the film expanded into 169 theatres and after 26 days of release it had grossed $8,128,345 and had spent another two weeks atop the US box office. Home media Looking for Mr. Goodbar was released on LaserDisc and VHS, with the most recent VHS release being in 1997. During a showing of the film on Turner Classic Movies, it was stated by Ben Mankiewicz that its subsequent unavailability on DVD or Blu-ray was owed to licensing complications surrounding the film's extensive use of popular music. Independent label Vinegar Syndrome, under license from Paramount, released the film on Ultra HD Blu-ray and standard Blu-ray on November 29, 2024, marking its debut on both formats. ==Reception and legacy==

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 63% rating based on 32 reviews, with an average rating of 6.40/10. The site's consensus states: "Diane Keaton gives an absolutely fearless performance in a sexual thriller whose ending will leave audiences trembling." On Metacritic the film has a score of 64 out of 100, based on 9 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. Many critics praised Diane Keaton's performance. Roger Ebert gave the film 3-out-of-4 stars, praising Keaton's performance but lamenting the "many loose ends and dead ends," some of which he blamed on significant alterations to the novel's plot. Gene Siskel also awarded 3-out-of-4 stars, writing that "Keaton is absolutely compelling in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, even when the film is not." Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called Keaton's performance "high among the year's finest" in a demanding role, and declared the film "powerful, sincere and overlong, and if the film raises questions about itself it is also thought-provoking." Variety stated: "Writer-director Brooks manifests his ability to catch accurately both the tone and subtlety of characters in the most repellant environments – in this case the desperate search for personal identity in the dreary and self-defeating world of compulsive sex and dope. Keaton's performance as the good/bad girl is excellent." Newsweek was also enthusiastic: "Looking for Mr. Goodbar could have been just another sensationalist movie version of a shocking best seller. But Richard Brooks has filmed it with power, seriousness and integrity." A retrospective review from AllMovie stated: "With the casting of Diane Keaton as Theresa, Looking for Mr. Goodbar became a then-rarity in Hollywood movies, depicting an everyday woman with an erotic life, rather than a vamp or a whore," rating the film 3-stars-out-of-5. Some critics found the film lurid and muddled; a review by Frank Rich for Time criticized Brooks for making "many crude miscalculations" in adapting the novel. John Simon noted that while the novel is set in New York City, the film is said to be located in San Francisco (though identifiably filmed in Chicago's Rush Street neighborhood). He also noted that "the main character is made considerably prettier, thus reducing the principal sources of her insecurity", as compared to her portrayal in the novel as something of a "Plain Jane". Pauline Kael noted, "Richard Brooks [...] has laid a windy jeremiad about our permissive society on top of fractured film syntax. He's lost the erotic, pulpy morbidity that made the novel a compulsive read; the film is splintered, moralistic, tedious." Leonard Maltin rated the film 1-stars-out-of-4, writing that the film "begins as an intelligent study of repressed young girl, then wallows endlessly in her new 'liberated' lifestyle", despite praising Keaton's performance. Rossner praised Keaton's performance. However, she had nothing to do with the making of the film and "detested" the final product. Psychiatry professor Robert O. Friedel suggested in 2006 that Theresa Dunn's behavior in the film is consistent with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. Barry Diller, who at the time served as head of Paramount Pictures, has described Looking for Mr. Goodbar as the turning point for the success of Paramount feature films during his reign. Awards and nominations • While Keaton was not nominated for an Academy Award for this film, she won Best Actress the same year for Annie Hall. ==See also==