Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977)

          A dark meditation on the Sexual Revolution that caroms wildly between sensitive vignettes and overwrought climaxes, Looking for Mr. Goodbar divided audiences during its original release but has since attained cult-movie notoriety, especially because, as of this writing, it has yet to be released on DVD or Blu-Ray. (Falling into obscurity often boosts a once-popular film’s reputation.) Adapted from a best-selling novel by Judith Rossner and written and directed by uncompromising auteur Richard Brooks, the movie is a cautionary tale, but it’s not entirely clear what Brooks wants to caution viewers against. Sometimes, it seems as if he’s castigating his lead character, a young professional woman with a wild sex life, for the sin of seeking physical fulfillment. At other times, it seems as if the villain of the piece is the lead character’s recklessness. And thanks to a gruesome narrative turn during the story’s third act, an implication is communicated that homosexuality is a malignant societal force. Suffice to say, the sexual politics of the movie have not aged well.

        Yet certain elements of the picture probably seemed damned weird right from the get-go—consider the awkward device of grown-up star Diane Keaton playing her character during college scenes, or such surrealistic flourishes as the trippy visual effect that’s featured during the final shots of the movie. In fact, Brooks takes a gonzo storytelling approach from start to finish simply by pitching the intensity level of key scenes absurdly high. Were it not for the supple textures of Keaton’s performance, Looking for Mr. Goodbar would feel like a cartoon, albeit a nihilistic one.

          The story follows Teresa (Keaton), a good girl from a religious New York City-area family, as she matures professionally and sexually. Following an eye-opening dalliance with her college professor, Teresa takes a job as a teacher at a school for deaf children, so right from the beginning of this young woman’s journey, her intellectual and physical lives are intertwined. Teresa’s older sister, Katherine (Tuesday Weld), is a high-strung swinger who gets in too deep with a sexually adventurous man, but instead of being frightened by Katherine’s experiences, Teresa is titillated.
          Soon, Teresa enters the swinger world and gets involved with men including Tony (Richard Gere), a small-time crook who introduces Teresa to cocaine. (One memorably campy scene features Tony, jacked up on blow, doing push-ups in Teresa’s apartment while wearing nothing but a jockstrap.) Teresa also becomes involved with James (William Atherton), a social worker who represents a “safe” choice of romantic partner. However, she shuns his old-fashioned normalcy in favor of freakier delights. Eventually, Teresa’s sexual wanderlust lands her in bed with Gary (Tom Berenger), a sexually confused young man with a prison record, which instigates the movie’s infamous final scene.

          Looking for Mr. Goodbar is strange on many levels, but the most noteworthy cinematic disharmony is the rift between the story Brooks is telling and the one Keaton is telling. Brooks delivers every narrative assertion with an exclamation point, eschewing subtlety for hand-wringing histrionics. Meanwhile, Keaton does extraordinary work, imbuing her performance with naturalism and spontaneity. In essence, Brooks tries to make a Grand Statement while Keaton sketches a character study. This has the effect of making Keaton feel separate from the rest of the movie, especially when Gere over-acts his way through a ridiculous performance that Brooks should have restrained. And while supporting players including Atherton, Richard Kiley, and Priscilla Pointer all deliver competent work, the only actor who achieves the same level of nuance as Keaton is Weld, a perpetually underutilized daredevil of a performer who is capable of incandescence in the right context. (Her work in this movie earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination.) Ultimately, Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a uniquely disjointed movie—part melodrama, part tragedy, and part oh-so-’70s bummer phantasmagoria.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar: FREAKY

Butch and Sundance: The Early Days (1979)

          Even though a proper sequel to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) was impossible, given the film’s definitive ending, 20th Century-Fox made three halting attempts to exploit the film’s popularity. In 1974, Elizabeth Montgomery starred in the TV movie Mrs. Sundance, imagining what happened to the Sundance Kid’s paramour, Etta Place, after the events of the original film. Montgomery was a substitute for Katharine Ross, who played Etta in the 1969 movie, but Ross reprised her original role in a second TV movie about Etta’s adventures, 1976’s Wanted: The Sundance Woman. Then, in 1979, Fox took the prequel route by casting new actors in the roles Paul Newman and Robert Redford made famous. Butch and Sundance: The Early Days depicts youthful misadventures including the formation of the bandits’ notorious gang (which was known as the Wild Bunch in real life but called the Hole-in-the-Wall gang in the 1969 movie).

          The accent for Butch and Sundance: The Early Days is on comedy, with lots of goofy sight gags like the outlaws’ use of a horse-drawn hearse as a getaway vehicle. As with most prequels, however, Butch and Sundance feels unnecessary, since it’s not as if audiences exited the first film with lots of unanswered questions. Furthermore, although director Richard Lester and his leading actors do the best they can with the bum hand they’re dealt, it would have been impossible for anyone to recapture the magic that director George Roy Hill caught on film during Newman and Redford’s first onscreen pairing.

          Lester, whose farcical Musketeer movies of the mid-’70s made him a logical choice to helm this wiseacre project, stages many scenes well, and he conjures an easygoing camaraderie between stars Tom Berenger (as Butch) and William Katt (as Sundance). Yet the movie’s script, by Allan Burns, is episodic, inconsequential, and meandering. (William Goldman, who won an Oscar for writing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, served as one of the prequel’s producers but did not officially contribute to the screenplay.) Berenger does an okay job of mimicking Newman’s rascally charm, and Katt efficiently evokes Redford’s sun-kissed cantankerousness. Unfortunately, the story they’re telling is so thin there’s even a scene providing the origin for the Sundance Kid’s moustache. Thanks to the actors’ amiable work and Lester’s deft orchestration of onscreen mayhem, Butch and Sundance is pleasant viewing but nothing more.

Butch and Sundance: The Early Days: FUNKY