brightsides Saw this film on AMC last week and it still holds up. I first saw this film in 1977 as a college student living in a one room apt away from home for the first time, and it had a major impact on me. Diane Keaton made the move from the comedic heroine to the troubled Theresa Dunn, a sensitive, caring teacher by day, looking for love in all the wrong places at night. Her inner turmoil from her childhood disfiguring disease; to the relationship with her hard-nosed, Notre Dame loving, Irish Catholic father; to subsequent lovers is heartbreaking. Her search for the male attention and acceptance that she didn't receive at home is portrayed with honesty and depth by Keaton. Richard Kiley skillfully plays her father, who is of a different generation, where women knew "their place". He would rather turn and look the other way than face some hard family truths. It's evident that Teresa has a love/hate relationship with him when she refuses to accept the nice guy social worker, James, as a suitor mostly because her father admires him. She would rather engage in dead-end conquests than have a committed, romantic, relationship. Tuesday Weld was nominated for a Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role as Kathryn, Teresa's high-flying, stewardess sister; who can do no wrong in her father's eyes. Richard Gere's energy is electric and frightening during his scenes with Teresa. He has the raw male sexuality and danger Teresa finds exciting yet she is clearly his intellectual superior. Interesting stuff. Tom Berenger is great as the sociopathic loser, and look for a split-second role for Brian Dennehey as a doctor. This movie can serve as both a cautionary tale and a history lesson....the sexual revolution never seemed so scary.

NORDIC-2 On Jan. 2, 1973 a 28-year-old schoolteacher named Roseann Quinn was stabbed to death in her New York City apartment by John Wayne Wilson, a drifter from Indiana she picked up in a bar across the street from her home on W. 72nd Street. Roseann Quinn's brutal murder revealed that she had lived a double life—as a respected, skilled and devoted teacher of deaf-mutes by day and a habitué of Westside bars at night, where she picked up random men for rough sex on a regular basis. Ms. Quinn's strange and lurid story generated reams of titillating newspaper fodder. It also prompted novelist Judith Rossner to write a best selling quasi-fictionalized version of her life and death: 'Looking for Mr. Goodbar' (Simon & Schuster, 1975). Writer-director Richard Brooks ('Lord Jim'; 'In Cold Blood') brings Rossner's book to the screen with somewhat ambiguous results. Diane Keaton's performance as Teresa Dunn (the Roseann Quinn figure) is mesmerizing—far and away, the best of her career—but Richard Brooks' screenplay turns Dunn/Quinn into a daring sexual rebel, druggie, and reckless hedonist when the evidence suggests that the real Roseann Quinn was a desperately lonely and decidedly masochistic personality who sought out abusive sexual encounters in keeping with her own low self-esteem (which stemmed from a repressive Irish Catholic upbringing and a congenital back deformation that left her ashamed of her body). By turning Roseann Quinn into the far more beautiful and charismatic Teresa Dunn, Brooks turns her death into a voyeuristic thriller for male viewers and a cautionary tale for sexually liberated women everywhere: they had better be careful flaunting their sexual assets or they might end up the victims of homicidal male rage. Despite these distortions, 'Looking for Mr. Goodbar' remains an eerily sinister and deeply disturbing film. Rivaling Diane Keaton's performance is that of Tuesday Weld, who plays Teresa's sybaritic but world-weary older sister, Katherine. Indeed Weld was so good she was nominated for a Best Supporting Oscar. 'Looking for Mr. Goodbar' also marks the film debut of Richard Gere as Tony Lo Porto, the John Wayne Wilson figure.

classicsoncall About half way into the picture, and after seeing Theresa's Janis Joplin poster on the wall enough times, I started wondering to myself, 'Is she going to wind up dead"? That seemed to be the path Diane Keaton's character was on, a descent into a self inflicted depravity that eventually spiraled out of control with her final singles bar encounter. Theresa telegraphs her eventual fate by stating at one point that "I don't believe in a future", as her father (Richard Kiley) rails against her free-wheeling lifestyle. The picture uniquely contrasts Theresa's outwardly responsible life as a teacher of deaf children with her nightly cruising of the bar scene looking for the next more challenging high.With a Seventies backdrop the picture is somewhat dated, though it accurately captures some of the more depressing aspects of the era, the increasing emergence of meaningless relationships, the ease of getting and using social drugs like pot and cocaine, and probably the worst of all, disco music. Very much a downer. I did get a kick though out of the not so subtle reference to Theresa's reading material, a copy of The Godfather, and Richard Gere's response to seeing the movie. Since he mentioned Al Pacino, I wonder why he didn't notice Theresa's striking resemblance to Kay Adams.

migca I saw "Mr. Goodbar" at a film festival screening, several years after it's initial release. In some ways (none of them good), this movie has haunted me ever since. I can still recall feeling strangely perturbed and confused as the film neared it's final minutes. I guess I expected that the ending would somehow magically bring the preceding grimy and occasionally chaotic events into some sort of focus.All I got from that ending was a brutal stomach ache similar to the lingering pain induced by a cheap sucker punch to the gut. I will readily admit to having gained no further understanding or insight into this film over the years. I still can't imagine why anyone would make a film like this, or what possible value or entertainment viewers derived from it.For me, Diane Keaton's performance is the only thing in the movie that keeps it from getting the lowest vote. That she managed to project some warmth and humanity from such a crudely drawn, relentlessly sad, and gratuitously self-destructive character, only made the ending that much more horrific and senseless. It's easily one of the worst experiences I've ever had in a movie theater.