Looking for Mr. Goodbar
Directed by: Richard Brooks
Written by: Richard Brooks (based on the novel by Judith Rossner)
Starring: Diane Keaton, Richard Gere, Tom Berenger, William Atherton, Tuesday Weld
Release Date: October 19, 1977
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5)
Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) is one of the most hateful, chaotic, and misogynistic movies of the 1970s. Despite Diane Keaton’s best efforts, Richard Brooks delivers a cinematic disaster that blames women for their own abuse and murder.
(Just a note, I intended to write a positive review of a Diane Keaton movie in the wake of her passing. This movie was recommended to me as one of her best performances. She's as good as she could be under the circumstances. Apologies to Keaton fans.)
A Film That Punishes Women for Existing
Wow. What a piece of trash.
Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a sensory nightmare — a film of utter chaos and incoherence. It’s as if Richard Brooks set out to punish both the audience and his lead character, Theresa Dunn, for daring to exist outside of patriarchal norms.
The message? If a woman is sexually liberated and steps away from her family, she’s asking to be taken advantage of, abused, or even murdered. That’s not subtext — that’s the actual takeaway of this movie.
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Diane Keaton Tries to Save a Lost Cause
Diane Keaton plays Theresa, an innocent woman trying to escape her suffocating Catholic family. Her reward for that independence? A string of emotionally and physically abusive men.
Her first boyfriend is a married professor who tells her, post-coitus, “I just can’t stand a woman’s company after I’ve f*ed her.” Charming, right? From there, she meets Tony (Richard Gere), a swaggering sex addict who uses her and disappears. Every relationship is another humiliation.
Between the chaos of her love life, we get scenes of Theresa tenderly teaching deaf children — a transparent attempt by Brooks to “redeem” her for the audience, as if to say, See, she’s not a total whore! It’s moral policing disguised as character development.
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A Gallery of Awful Men
Every man in this movie is an abuser, and yet the movie blames Theresa for their actions. James (William Atherton) starts out as a nice guy — until she rejects him, at which point he becomes obsessed and violent. Then there’s Gary (Tom Berenger), a gay man introduced in a bizarre, incoherent parade sequence who exists solely to embody Brooks’ twisted sense of sexual panic.
By the time Gary snorts cocaine, rapes Theresa, and stabs her to death, the film’s point becomes clear: women who seek sexual freedom are doomed. Brooks frames it as tragedy, but it’s really moral punishment.
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Misogyny and Madness Behind the Camera
Beyond the hateful message, Looking for Mr. Goodbar is simply bad filmmaking. Brooks shoots everything like he’s terrified of silence — televisions blare, radios scream, extras wander across the frame, and the camera jitters as if the operator is drunk.
It’s an exhausting sensory overload, a constant assault on the viewer. The noise isn’t atmosphere; it’s incompetence.
Even Tuesday Weld, playing Theresa’s sister, gets thrown under the bus. The film frames her as a “good girl gone bad” — promiscuous, drugged up, and punished by the story. Every woman in this movie is either a saintly mother or a damned whore. There’s no in-between.
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The Verdict: A Cruel, Hateful Relic
Looking for Mr. Goodbar isn’t just bad — it’s offensive. It’s the kind of movie that pretends to explore sexual liberation while secretly despising it. The story blames women for male violence, then pretends to offer a moral lesson about “dangerous lifestyles.”
This isn’t provocative art — it’s propaganda for repression.
Even Diane Keaton can’t save it. Despite her honest, layered performance, the movie uses her as a punching bag for Brooks’ toxic worldview. The result is an angry, ugly, morally bankrupt mess that deserves to be forgotten.
Final Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ — 1 star for Diane Keaton, 0 for everything else.
