Looking for Mr. Goodbar

Looking for Mr. Goodbar could have been just another sensationalist movie version of a shocking best seller. But Richard Brooks has filmed it with power, seriousness and integrity. [24 Oct 1977, p.126]

In Looking for Mr Goodbar, writer-director Richard Brooks manifests his ability to catch accurately both the tone and subtlety of characters in the most repellant environments - in this case the desperate search for personal identity in the dreary and self-defeating world of compulsive sex and dope. Diane Keaton's performance as the good/bad girl is excellent.

The performance and the character are fully realized, even in this movie that finds room for so many loose ends and dead ends.

What makes the film — which Richard Brooks directed and scripted, adapting Judith Rossner’s bestselling 1975 novel of the same name — so fascinating and repellent at once is precisely the confusion and anxiety it articulates about women’s sexual freedom.

Only Diane Keaton's performance counters the overall heavy-handedness.

Miss Keaton, who continues to grow as an actress and film presence, is worth paying attention to in bits and pieces of the movie. She's too good to waste on the sort of material the movie provides, which is artificial without in anyway qualifying as a miracle fabric.

Brooks, hardly a great director, doesn't quite pull off this adaptation of the Rossner novel.