Movie Details
| Title: | Looking for Mr. Goodbar | |
| Director: | Richard Brooks | |
| Year: | 1977 | |
| Genre: | Drama | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 11.14.25 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (2)
- In Cold Blood
- The Professionals
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 11.14.25 | Internet | This Screening is part of event: DVRfest 2025 Diane Keaton plays a liberated woman struggling with her individuality, her burgeoning career, and needing some dick. This is based on a real event but I think the movie lays it on thick with the women's liberation movement and modern mores through the mid 70s which is where I think aspects of the film become problematic today. In doing so, I think it's justifiable to say Brooks might have been using the real life crime as a message to women to be careful what you wish for, or this is what you'll get. There was a period in the early 2000s where I moved back home after graduating college and had a "pre-life crisis" of sorts where I was not at all interested in using my degree to get a job. I'd burnt out on my major as a junior and spent senior year floundering with what the hell I was going to do with my life. Thankfully, my parents let me move back in and, after several years of basically living in my room, my dad kickstarted my career by putting me on a contract he won. So for 18 months I worked for my dad and earned enough to move out here to Austin, where for 2 more years I worked long-distance for him maintaining his small business' website in exchange for a couple grand a month. During that time living with my parents again, I watched a shitload of movies. This journal started at the very tail end of that period right before I moved here in 2005, but these were the days of tivo and on-demand movies and taping stuff off cable. We still got TV Guide so I fell into a pattern of going through all the movies in the back of each week's tv guide and circling everything I wanted to see and if it didn't play on a channel with commercials I watched it or taped it and watched it later. The single channel I taped the most from was TCM. These were prime Robert Osbourne years where he'd intro most every movie and give a little context for it. They'd also put together these impressive little pastiche interstitial bits and they had these charming little intro cinematics like afternoon matinee and late night nighthawks-inspired scenes and early-morning sunrise stuff, and since I was programming my vcr left and right I was getting stuff from all hours. This is when I saw the majority of film noirs (until the studios started releasing everything on dvd) and this helped me finish off the AFI Top 100 list and pretty much any other movie I was mildly interested in I saw. Such is the case with Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Unbeknownst to me, this movie has been pretty hard to see for the past 20 years, just finally making it to physical release via vinegar syndrome late last year. The reason is apparently music rights, with a good dozen disco hits playing throughout all the bar scenes. The songs are even credited in the main titles grouped by record label. But TCM played it no problem. They only played it once every year or so, but if you were on the ball you could catch it. They did that for a lot of movies as I recall. Stuff that was commercially unavailable would still pop up on the channel from time to time. I think that's how I saw The Green Slime with the amazing theme song. Anyway, when I saw this 20-some years ago (pre-journal), I remember just a couple scenes and being absolutely punched in the face by the ending. The ending to this movie has stuck with me ever since, very vividly written onto my brain. It is harsh and raw and brutal and a little twisted, which I'll get into later. So with this disco book I read and thinking about NYC in the 70s in general, I wanted to go back and watch this again to see if it was as good as I remember and if the ending is amplified in my memory or not. For all it's problematic angles, I still liked this quite a bit. More than commenting on the dangers of women's lib, my take on this movie is that Diane Keaton's just trying to be her fully realized self but all men are assholes (and murderers). It does feature some dancing though. I have to say that William Atherton lets loose much better than Al Pacino, but they both pale in comparison to a young Richard Gere hopping around doing fake karate in a jockstrap holding a glow-in-the-dark switchblade. I very much like how the movie flits into fantasy sequences in Diane Keaton's mind. It happens often at the beginning then dwindles more than I'd like it to but one in particular stuck with me where she pictures cops raiding her apartment and finding the drugs and pills she has stashed in various places and arresting her and ruining her life, which causes her to flush it all down the toilet. But Atherton, Gere, the married professor, all the randos, none of them are what Keaton wants. And I think it was pretty sensational at the time to see this kind of brazenly sexual woman depicted on screen (especially from Diane Keaton who bares a lot of skin here), but, very similarly to Cruising, from a 2025 perspective this is an artifact of that post-birth-control, legalized-abortion, pre-AIDS world where it was actually ok to be hedonistic for a tiny little while. SPOILERS I think that's what makes the ending so affecting. Tom Berenger can't get it up because he's a self-hating gay who's left his wife to shack up with a boyfriend, he's violent and unstable, he starts to throw Diane Keaton around, she fights back, throwing stuff, struggling, he gets her on the bed and starts to rape her, and she says "Do it! Do it!" then while he's raping her he stabs her and she dies and it's all done with a strobe light effect and ends in silence. Absolutely brutal but I think the worst part is that moment where she WANTS the sex. It's the same thing that gets brought up all the time with the rape scene in Straw Dogs. It's very problematic for a woman to have complex feelings about non-consensual sex, and maybe movies written and directed by men are not the right forum to explore that issue, but I know in modern kink communities consensual non-consensual encounters are a thing so part of me thinks it can be bad and complicated at the same time. Certainly I don't think Diane Keaton's asking to be killed in that moment, but the whole movie's about her sexual and general independence so maybe a part of her's enjoying the rough play? I don't know... but that one little bit really sticks with me. I can't imagine sitting through that ending in a theater with other people. Ok, it's very late, there's no way I'm making it through another movie, but I have to try. This one was somehow almost two and a half hours as well so I'm picking something that's 80 minutes but sticking in NYC. |
