Zach Vasquez
When Diane Keaton won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1977 for her iconic turn as the title character of Annie Hall, there were some who felt she was awarded for the wrong performance that year.
Looking for Mr. Goodbar reads, on paper, not too different to Annie Hall: Keaton stars as Theresa Dunn, a young Manhattanite dealing with the pitfalls of (then) modern romance in the midst of the feminist revolution (“The Decade of the Dame,” as a news broadcast in the film sarcastically refers to it). Like Woody Allen’s doppelganger in Hall, Alvy Singer, Theresa is given to comic bouts of daydreaming, which director Richard Brooks depicts in a similarly mundane manner. It even engages in some meta-comedy, having her read The Godfather at one point, and even discuss the movie (in which Keaton co-starred). Like Annie, Theresa is smart but flighty, beautiful but messy, and fiercely protective of her independence even as she finds herself attracted to demanding men.
That’s where the comparisons stop.
If Annie Hall is about the ways in which those demanding, insecure men warp a free-spirited woman, Looking for Mr. Goodbar is about how they kill her.
Brooks’s film is an adaptation of Judith Rossner’s 1975 best selling novel of the same name, itself based on the true-life murder of Roseann Quinn in 1973 by John Wayne Wilson. The broad strokes of Rossner’s novel and Brook’s film follow the real story: Theras Dunn is a suburban girl next door type, raised Irish Catholic in New Jersey. She moves to New York City in college and takes a job teaching deaf children. By night, she cruises local singles bars, reading and picking up men. It is one of these men who will brutally rape and stab her to death in the nightmarish climax of the film—arguably the most disturbing finale in the anals of American cinema.
The film takes some liberties with the book, which itself is a fictionalized account of Quinn’s tragic story. Along with the aforementioned fantasy scenes, Brooks devotes more attention to Theresa’s family life, where she is constantly butting heads with her conservative father (Richard Kiley) and lending support to her older sister (Tuesday Weld, who would receive one of the film’s two Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress), a similarly “fallen woman” whose decadent lifestyle of casual sex and drugs seems to repel Theresa even as it rubs off on her. These scenes—particularly those with her father—often come off like bad Paddy Chayefsky and lend credence to the film’s detractors, who charge it as hamfisted in its social commentary.
Where the film comes alive is in its depiction of New York City’s nightlife, which Brooks milks for all its glamour and sleaze. This is the Fun City of so many classic ‘70s dramas: we can imagine Travis Bickle creepily glaring at Theresa from across a crowded bar; her pompous ass of a professor (Alan Feinstein), with whom she embarks on her first serious affair, likely attends the same parties as Alvy Singer; while her hotshot hustler hookup Tony (Richard Gere, in one of his early breakout roles) probably turned the same tricks as Joe Buck.
Brooks scores these scenes to an array of disco and soul bangers from the likes of Donna Summer, Diana Ross, Commodores, Bill Withers, Bozz Scaggs, and The O’Jays, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a bleaker, more brutal film with as bumping a soundtrack. Said soundtrack is the main reason the film has been widely unavailable for so long, with licensing rights tangling it up until recently (a new 4K and Blu-ray edition from Vinegar Syndrome was released late last year).
The crux of the narrative revolves around Theresa’s love life, particularly her push-pull relationship with the scuzzy but sexy Tony and seemingly nice guy social worker James (William Atherton). Theresa is upfront with both men about what she wants from them (“Don’t love me, just make love to me”), but of course all this does is make them more possessive.
This is one of the biggest changes Brooks makes to the story (much to the chagrin of Rossner, who publicly disparaged the film even as she praised Keaton’s performance). Whereas in the novel James remains a wounded sad sack, the movie turns him into something much darker and creepier. A scene in which he fabricates a horrifying psychosexual memory of his mother and father shows him to be just as fucked up and dangerous as the other men in Theresa’s life, from her rageaholic father to the violent Tony to the self-hating gay drifter Gary (Tom Berenger, in only his second film role) who will eventually murder her.
Unlike Rossner’s novel, which reveals There’s death in its first pages before jumping back in time, Brooks’s film doesn’t tip its hand as to where it’s all leading, although by the third act it is very clear that Theresa’s life is in grave danger. That it is neither Tony nor James who ends up taking her life, but a stranger who only shows up in the final 15 minutes, makes the already horrifying ending even more upsetting. The idea that this film is a repudiation of feminism–as many critics at the time, as well as modern reviewers on Letterboxd, claim–rather than an examination of the inherently predatory nature of all men doesn’t hold water.
(The sole male character in the film who proves an exception is the brother of one of her students, played by a very young LeVar Burton. Initially, the brooding teen comes off as a threat, intentionally playing off white audience stereotypes, but as the film progresses he becomes a silent guardian figure. The scene in which he intervenes on behalf of Theresa and kicks the shit out of an abusive Tony earned spontaneous applause from the rep house audience I caught the movie with.)
Certainly, there is a reactionary flavor to some of the material, including the decision (taken from Rossner’s novel) to make Theresa’s killer a gay man, when in reality, Wilson was a straight married man with children—although it bears noting that Brooks complicates things by showing an act of gay bashing as the inciting incident that drives Gary over the edge.
Regardless, to view the film through so black-and-white a political/moralistic framework does a disservice to it. As author Megan Abbott—whose noir novels traverse the dark crossroads where female desire butts up against patriarchal violence—wrote in her Letterbox review of the film: “This isn’t a movie about women paying the price for acting on their desires. It’s a movie about a beset masculinity, men in perpetual crisis post-sexual revolution.”
That this film is more relevant than ever in 2025 is a devastating confirmation of everything Brooks, Keaton, and co. were trying to say here. Mr. Goodbar is still out there, god help us.
“Looking for Mr. Goodbar” is available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome.
