Richard Brooks (1977)
Looking for Mr Goodbar is part of this month’s BFI programme commemorating the Scala cinema in King’s Cross and helping to promote a new documentary about it. Jane Giles, a programmer at the Scala for the last ten years of its life as a film house (1983-93), curator of the BFI season and co-director with Ali Catterall of the documentary, introduced this screening of Richard Brooks’s bleak drama. Giles began by asking a full house in NFT2 for a show of hands on four questions. Who had seen the new documentary? Or had ever seen a film at the Scala? (Plenty of hands went up, roughly equal numbers both times.) Or had seen Looking for Mr Goodbar previously? (Fewer hands.) In answer to the last question – who saw Looking for Mr Goodbar at the Scala? – only two hands went up. Jane Giles seemed impressed there were as many as that because, she explained, there’d only ever been two Scala screenings of Brooks’s film (one in July 1984, the other July 1985). Giles also acknowledged that it wasn’t typical Scala fare. The full title of her documentary is Scala!!! Or, the Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World’s Wildest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits. The place made its name showing, as well as various cult curiosities, sexploitation, horror, kung fu and (what’s now termed) LGBTQIA+ cinema. That Looking for Mr Goodbar came to be screened at the Scala at all is a clue to its split personality. The film is politically reactionary but sexually explicit. It’s misogynistic yet foregrounds female sexual appetite and behaviour – as the storyline dictates – to a degree very unusual in a mainstream Hollywood picture of the time.
Brooks’s screenplay is an adaptation of Judith Rossner’s 1975 best-seller of the same name. Rossner’s novel was inspired by a real-life crime – the murder, at the start of 1973, of a twenty-eight-year-old primary school teacher called Roseann Quinn. Since 1969, Quinn – a native New Yorker, raised a Catholic – had taught in a Bronx school for deaf children. In her private life, she developed the habit of meeting men in local singles bars and taking them back to her studio apartment in West 72nd Street. She was stabbed to death there apparently by one such pick-up (John Wayne Wilson committed suicide in jail while awaiting trial for Quinn’s murder). As a young teenager, Roseann Quinn spent a year in hospital after a back operation for scoliosis, which left her with a slight limp. In Judith Rossner’s novel, the sex drive of Theresa Dunn, Quinn’s fictional alter ego, is portrayed as psychologically aberrant because sex is all that she wants from a man – sex unaccompanied by love. Rossner makes use of Roseann Quinn’s medical history to elaborate Theresa’s abnormality. As a young child, she had polio; her parents were too preoccupied with Theresa’s siblings to notice, until the damage was done, that muscle weakness resulting from polio was causing her spine to curve. The scoliosis surgery has left Theresa with, as well as a limp, a scar on her back that’s virtually the mark of Cain. Theresa’s first adult relationship is with her college professor, Martin Engle. She’s emotionally committed to, as well as sexually excited by, him but Professor Engle, a married man, doesn’t reciprocate that commitment. Insufficiently loved as a child and used by her first lover, Theresa not only gives up post-Engle on the idea of receiving love but is also incapable of showing it – except, in a highly circumscribed form, to the deaf kids to whom she devotes her working hours.
Whereas Rossner slightly backdates her protagonist’s murder to the first day of the 1970s, Richard Brooks moves the Roseann Quinn timeframe forward: the movie’s Theresa Dunn dies in the early hours of New Year’s Day 1977. This time adjustment, though not large, is significant. Although Rossner’s story feels like a cautionary tale, Theresa, as a case-cum-character-study, is individual enough; she doesn’t come across chiefly as representative of a generation or social type. If that’s also true of the film it’s only to the extent that the actress playing Theresa – Diane Keaton – had very recently emerged as a highly individual screen presence: Woody Allen’s Annie Hall was released in April 1977, just six months before Goodbar opened in American cinemas. Brooks’s script and direction, however, present Theresa – emphatically – as a casualty of the permissive society and second-wave feminism. The repeated shots of seedy New York streets at night – neon signs advertising sex shows and porn movies – might seem to echo Taxi Driver (1976) but the cityscape’s infernal quality in Martin Scorsese’s film is seen from, and exaggerated by, Travis Bickle’s disturbed perspective. In Looking for Mr Goodbar, New York’s nocturnal possibilities are a magnet to Theresa Dunn and the abandon-all-hope point of view is the director’s. When Brooks inserts a television news report of an anniversary celebration of the women’s liberation movement, the male reporter’s tone of voice is sarcastic and disparaging. Theresa goes to a party – hosted by her sister Katherine (Tuesday Weld) and Katherine’s latest man – which starts with a screening of blue movies and culminates in drug-fuelled group sex. Brooks makes his anti-heroine’s spinal condition hereditary: she feels she can’t risk motherhood and asks a doctor to sterilise her. That change to her condition in the novel might seem to dilute the film’s anti-permissive stance – you’d expect Brooks to show Theresa having sex followed by an abortion. He doesn’t quite forego the opportunity, though: airline hostess Katherine (who, unlike her sister, romanticises each one of her short-lived Mr Rights) terminates a pregnancy.
The only one of Jane Giles’s questions that my hand went up for was the third – I saw Looking for Mr Goodbar on its original British release, in early 1978. The film’s clashing elements, evident enough then, are all the more conspicuous now. With 2020s vision, Brooks’s disapproving but persisting description of Theresa’s sex life seems more than ever like having it both ways, censuring and titillating at the same time. The picture, while condemning sexual licence, exploits the permissiveness of New Hollywood: there’s plenty of bare flesh in evidence, female and male. (Goodbar fared well at the box office.) It’s also more striking in long retrospect that a movie from a major studio (Paramount) was apparently denouncing feminism so soon after women’s lib had entered the cultural mainstream. The protagonist’s harshest critic in the film is her blue-collar father (Richard Kiley). A choleric loudhailer whenever he addresses Theresa, he’s blind to the promiscuity of Katherine, his favoured daughter, as well as maudlin and determinedly wrong-headed about his own family pedigree. Mr Dunn is such a ridiculous pain in the neck that he’s wholly ineffective as a spokesman for decent traditional values, so deluded that he’s a feeble representative of patriarchy. Looking for Mr Goodbar has aged typically in visual terms for a Hollywood product of its era. William Fraker’s cinematography was Oscar-nominated in 1978; except for the external nighttime sequences, the film’s palette has decayed into the pink-and-ginger colour scheme of plenty of its contemporaries.
You get used to that but the film is hard to watch both because it’s grim and because it’s bad. Jane Giles in her introduction quoted Pauline Kael’s dismissal of Goodbar as ‘a windy jeremiad about our permissive society on top of fractured film syntax’ and it is a dog’s breakfast. A few examples … The narrative occasionally switches into what’s soon revealed to be Theresa’s fantasy or nightmare. These sequences have no impact: her actual life is painted so garishly that her imagination is tamer than reality. When she first meets Tony (Richard Gere), who proves to be her most aggressively persistent sex partner, she’s in a bar with a drink and a hard-copy edition of The Godfather. Italian-American Tony comments on the book, says he’s seen the movie, mentions Al Pacino: if Tony doesn’t realise he’s talking to a woman incarnated by the actress who played Pacino’s wife in The Godfather films, Goodbar audiences certainly did and do. This encounter got a deserved laugh in NFT2 although that’s surely not what Brooks intended. It’s true The Godfather features in Judith Rossner’s novel but Mario Puzo’s mega-seller had only recently been published according to Rossner’s timeframe; by 1976, when Theresa and Tony meet, it had become a much larger cultural phenomenon. The retention of Puzo’s book seems to present it – bizarrely – as an emblem of the societal malaise that Brooks is critiquing. Why didn’t he take advantage of his own adjustment of the timeframe to have Theresa reading fiction more apposite to his agenda – something like Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (first published in 1973)? Numerous classroom scenes illustrate what a dedicated, effective teacher Theresa is: it’s hard to know if these are meant to give an extra tragic dimension to (what Brooks sees as) her fatal flaw or make us wonder what else she needs if her working life is so fulfilling, or what. After she and Tony have snorted cocaine, he gives Theresa a Quaalude to bring her down, she sleeps in next morning and arrives late for school. When she arrives, her class of eight year olds – as a disapproving colleague reveals to Theresa – is running riot. The colleague’s action in letting them run riot seems no less reprehensible than Theresa’s sleep-in.
When Theresa apologises to the kids, some of them are disapproving too; in expressing their disapproval, they start to overact – a tendency epidemic in the film’s adult cast. It afflicts all the main men in Theresa’s life: Alan Feinstein as Professor Engle; Richard Gere, who’s uncharacteristically hyperactive as Tony; William Atherton as James, the sexually inhibited social worker who tries and fails to make a good woman of Theresa; Tom Berenger, as Gary, who eventually murders her. Gary lives with his older gay boyfriend, who has persuaded him to drag up for New Year’s Eve; nearly all his female garb disappears in a street scuffle. Furiously ashamed and upset, Gary puts his own clothes back on, dumps his lover and goes to the bar where he meets Theresa. When they go back to her apartment, he tells her he has a pregnant wife in Florida but they go to bed anyway; when Gary can’t get an erection and Theresa tells him it doesn’t matter, he decides she’s impugning his manhood, rapes her then stabs her to death. The attack is shown in strobe lighting – the strobe was a Christmas present to Theresa from James. What seemed a puzzling choice of gift at the time is now explained: it comes in handy for Richard Brooks’s big finish. I had to look away during this, of course (there’s another difference between 1978 and 2024) – as I also sometimes did watching Richard Kiley. That was a pointless exercise since I couldn’t avert my ears as well as my eyes. In a keen contest, Kiley’s performance as Theresa’s father is the worst of the lot.
The main actresses fare better. Another of the film’s retrospective points of interest is watching Diane Keaton in what proved to be such an untypical role. Keaton supplies the only human interest in the gruesome saga and, using her great comedy instincts, water-in-the-desert moments of humour. Yet her aforementioned individuality, although it makes Looking for Mr Goodbar easier to sit through, also gets in the way; it feels increasingly wrong for a character whose fate is predetermined. Katherine isn’t much of a role but Tuesday Weld (who received the film’s only other Oscar nomination, for Supporting Actress) is empathic and animated. The sisters’ mother is even less of a role and Priscilla Pointer can’t do anything with it. (In 1976-77 Pointer cornered the market in parents whose main job is to watch on aghast: she was Amy Irving’s mother in Brian de Palma’s Carrie.) What else to recommend? There’s a good selection of contemporary pop on the soundtrack, including Thelma Houston’s ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’; this is supported by Artie Kane’s original score, whose muted melancholy has a more forgiving tone than Richard Brooks’s direction. The film’s intrinsic merits are, frankly, few – but Looking for Mr Goodbar fascinates now as a 1970s Hollywood artefact.
13 January 2024
