Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Paramount, 1977)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I looked up last night’s schedule for Turner Classic Movies and decided to watch the film they were showing at 9 p.m. as part of a series of “Body Images on Film”: Looking for Mr. Goodbar, a 1977 Paramount production written and directed by Richard Brooks from a best-selling novel by Judith Rossner about a young woman, Teresa Dunn (Diane Keaton, in her first major role outside Woody Allen’s orbit), who’s a special-ed teacher dealing with deaf children by day and an habitué of singles bars by night who is eventually murdered in her apartment by one of her tricks. I remember reading Rossner’s novel in the 1970’s and watching the film around the same time, though I don’t recall under what auspices I first saw it. It wasn’t in a theatre, but I believe it was on a color TV at my mom’s apartment from a premium cable channel. I remembered very little about the movie except that it deviated from the book in an ill-advised way: Rossner began the novel with the murder and a brief sketch of who the killer was and what his motive was – he was a small-town kid who’d come to New York City, been picked up by a Gay man and more or less been forced into a sexual relationship with him, tried to pick up Teresa to show that he could get it up with a woman and therefore wasn’t “really” Gay, only he couldn’t and, in the novel’s most chilling scene (that was left out of the movie) after he can’t perform with her, he jacks off in her apartment and leaves his cum on her highly prized comforter. This freaks her out and she confronts him; he says, “I fucked you pretty good, didn’t I?” Sne snaps back, “You fucked yourself better,” and that sets him off on his murderous rage.

The film tells Teresa’s story in chronological order and doesn’t even hint at the murder until it occurs at the end – though probably most viewers in 1977 had either read Rossner’s novel or at least heard of it and therefore knew how the story ended and experienced Teresa’s story with the cloud of doom hanging over it that Rossner intended. I remember reading Lindsay Marracotta’s non-fiction book The Sad-Eyed Ladies about the late-1970’s straight singles bar scene and found it made it seem a lot more fun than either Rossner’s novel or Brooks’s film did. In some ways Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a film of its time – we hear a lot of the pop music of the period, mostly disco or soul (enough that the opening credits contain quite a few acknowledgments to the record labels that licensed it – it was still early in the expansion of movie credits and before that sort of information got relegated to the ending roll) and we see a lot of sorry-looking people hanging out at bars in the last stages of desperation. It’s also very much a pre-AIDS movie; not only do the people involved in the pickup lifestyle seem unworried about getting pregnant (though Teresa’s equally licentious sister Katherine, played by Tuesday Weld in the sort of dramatic departure from her previous dumb-blonde roles that virtually guaranteed her the Academy Award nomination she got for this part, does end up with a couple of babies from her shenanigans) and they don’t seem concerned about STD’s either. The one scene in the film that features a condom turns it into a joke – Teresa’s “nice” boyfriend James (played by William Atherton as a decent-looking but psychologically crippled nerd) brings one and she blows it like a balloon, jokes about it (“Who’s that supposed to protect – you or me?”) and insists that she’s never seen one before. (It’s all too easy to believe that!) And the film shows its age technologically as well; the phones are black dial units, permanently wried to a wall (in one scen of what passes for comic relief, Teresa almost misses a call when she accidentally drops her phone in her toilet), and in one of the scenes featuring a wild party hosted by Katherine and her husband de jour they watch porn … in black-and-white on a 16 mm projector.

Like the book, the film focuses on two of Teresa’s lust objects in particular: James, whom she meets when he’s a welfare worker whom she talks out of reporting the live-in boyfriend of one of her students’ mother, and Tony (played by the young Richard Gere when he was still the guy you called for the roles John Travolta turned down), a thoroughly obnoxious thug who has enough lock-picking skills he can let himself into Teresa’s apartment any time he likes and whose approaches on her verge on rape. In some ways Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a souvenir of the late-1970’s singles bar scene before AIDS and the fear around it virtually demolished it (singles bars made a comeback in the 1990’s as straight people realized it was not going to break out of the Queer community into the “general population” – only now they’ve pretty much died out again; even before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic many of them had closed because people interested in casual sex more often hook up online), but it also seems at times like a 1930’s movie. It’s a highly moralistic film that attempts to steer people away from the demi-monde by making the whole thing seem too boring to bother with, and Teresa’s murder at the end smacks too much of old-line “moral” propaganda that “the wages of sin is death.” It got attacked when it came out by Gay critics who resented that the killer was a self-hating Gay man, and it split the critical community wide open.

One gets the impression from Looking for Mr. Goodbar that there was a better film waiting to be made from this premise – the woman who leads a sexual and “moral” double life – and frankly that better film might well have been based on Anaïs Nin’s A Spy In the House of Love, in which the heroine is married but embarks on a series of casual but at least mid-term affairs with various men and manages to juggle her two identities. Nin’s story succeeded where Rossner’s novel and Brooks’s film failed in dramatizing the appeal and making both the sex and the danger from being “found out” believable; we identify with Nin’s heroine (or at least I did!) in ways I never quite warmed up to Teresa here. Besides, Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a quite modern-seeming film in one respect: there’s no one in it we actually like. The key element in Teresa’s past that is supposed to explain what’s driving her is a bout with scoliosis, a congenital disease (though she’s been lied to and told it was the result of a childhood bout with polio) that required her to get corrective surgery to try to bend her back into a normal shape that wouldn’t put her in constant pain. At least according to her recollection (we have reason to doubt she’s telling the truth because Brooks occasionally cut in footage that looks like a real part of the story and later turns out to be Teresa’s fantasy), she had to wear a body cast as she recovered from this operation and she spent the recovery period in a bed in the living room, on full display to anyone who came over.

Teresa’s parents (Richard Kiley and Priscilla Pointer) are hard-core Catholics who routinely denounce birth control, abortion and the overall decline of morality, though she continues to live with them until a final confrontation when dad says, “As long as you live under my roof, you’ll live by my rules,” and she moves out. Her first affair is with a college English teacher whom she works for as an intern and who has a supercilious attitude. Like a lot of Teresa’s later lovers, he likes to finger the scar from her operation – much to Teresa’s irritation. On one of her prowls through the New York sexual underground Teresa gets drugs – first marijuana and then cocaine – and pretty soon she’s hooked; when one of her pickups gives her a Quaalude she oversleeps and is late for her teaching gig the next morning, and that blows the whole carefully built structure of trust she’d created with the kids in her class. (The young LeVar Burton appears as the older, hearing brother of a deaf Black girl in Teresa’s class.) There’s really no one in this movie you can identify with – not Teresa herself, not her bitch parents, not her crazy sister and not any of her, to use the term loosely, boyfriend. We just get a rather clinical picture of a young woman whose life is spiraling out of control, and Brooks couldn’t resist the old-Hollywood touch (he’d been working in films since the late 1940’s and had made his directorial debut in 1950) of having her swear off the singles-bar lifestyle and tell us that New Year’s 1977 (the film takes place mostly from New Year’s 1976 to New Year’s 1977, and we get such time clues as a Jimmy Carter for President commercial) is going to be her last night – when of course it becomes the night she is murdered by a trick. The idea that at least some critics in 1977 held up Teresa Dunn as a feminist heroine living her life her own way, unbound by moral conventions, seems incredible today; now she seems like the sort of movie character that makes you wish you could walk into the screen and talk some sense into her!