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Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), written and directed by Richard Brooks, is based on a 1975 book by Judith Rossner — a novel that, in turn, was loosely based on the circumstances leading up to the 1971 murder of a schoolteacher for the deaf named Roseann Quinn by a man she had taken home from a bar. Rossner had originally pitched a long, reported piece on Quinn, her life, and the tragedy which would soon publicly define it for Esquire. But after the magazine killed the article — the publication got cold feet because of potential legal trouble — Rossner turned toward dramatization, which in many ways liberated her. She wouldn’t be so obligated to truth (the character in the book, though very similar to her inspiration, was named Theresa Dunn); she could more openly, which is also to say problematically, suggest that Quinn, in a lot of ways, submissively colluded in her violent demise. 

Quinn’s story had been a media sensation before Rossner’s book in large part because it could be easily configured into evidence for a conservative, moral panic-style talking point to push against then-vogue feminist ideologies around sexual freedom. During the evenings, Quinn regularly spent time in singles bars and often took men home for one-night stands. As if it warranted conspiratorial whispering, she was often framed as having a “double life” — like it was unimaginable, and somehow morally contradictory, that a woman could both be a skilled and compassionate teacher and also someone who liked having unattached sex and wasn’t particularly interested in marriage. The subtext (though calling it subtext is probably generous) lurking in the coverage of Quinn and Rossner’s subsequent character studyification of her life was that an onrush of unmarried sex inexorably leads either to spiritual and/or physical death. Had Quinn not done [blank], she wouldn’t have been violently killed. The impulse was first to question and diagnose Quinn’s actions. Then, if at all, the systems and attitudes that inspire people to speculate so fervently about Quinn’s doings above those of her murderer’s in the first place. 

The movie adaptation of Looking for Mr. Goodbar stars Diane Keaton, just six months fresh from her star-cementing role in Annie Hall, as Theresa; she gives a captivating and emotionally eloquent performance. Though there are a handful of intense bursts, usually founded on keyed-up interactions Theresa has with her forever-disapproving father (Richard Kiley) and her on-screen love interests (a frenetic hustler type played by Richard Gere and a prissy welfare agent whom others see as “marriage material” portrayed by William Atherton), the performance also doesn’t feel out of step, necessarily, with the type of work Keaton is best known for. She employs on Theresa the familiar jumpily anxious body language, the line deliveries that suggest someone who spends a lot of time in her head, subjugated by overthought. It’s the unfamiliar context in which we’re seeing Keaton do a variation on her shtick that makes her especially interesting to watch here. We deduce the personal imbues the character. 

Diane Keaton in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

Without the homicidal finale — lit, nightmarishly, by a strobe light — Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a mostly engaging character study, mainly on account of Keaton’s arresting work. In real time, Brooks isn’t doing much explicit moralizing, and so we’re better able to wade through Theresa’s searching life — a Sisphyean quest for fulfillment — and be compulsively fascinated by its rhythms. Very few of the scenarios admittedly don’t feel overconstructed, though. Scenes in the classroom, populated by no more than 10 students, don’t not warm the heart (no one would finish the movie thinking Roseann/Theresa didn’t love her job), but they’re also a little too caricaturedly Theresa is the greatest teacher in the world. Evenings spent at clubs don’t have the right energy in part because visually the settings themselves strike us as quickly designed sets doused in glowing pinks and blues. 

The film is at its weakest when it’s seemingly evincing the “causes” of Theresa’s lifestyle. You can feel it straining to use these moments as fodder for an armchair diagnosis. There’s her early relationship with her married professor (a terrible Alan Feinstein — he’s always about two or three levels higher than he needs to be) who mistreats her and might be the only relationship she’s really emotionally invested herself in. And there is Theresa’s childhood household dynamic, where her father dominates and her mother (Priscilla Pointer) mostly just sits quietly. With these strings of background, the suggestion is that Theresa’s pleasure-seeking is rooted in both a need for a dominance she hadn’t had in the relationship which for so long defined her, and a fear of “settling down” and becoming someone as walked on as her mother. (Theresa’s “perfect” older sister, played tinnily by Tuesday Weld, is even “wilder” than her younger sibling; most of her life is spent swinging, though the movie painstakingly reminds us how ungratifying that is for her.) But I think this fixation on why Theresa is the way she is is a little silly (there’s an almost-parental worriedness about it) because all she is doing is acting like a not-very-unusual 20-something, having casual sex and doing drugs sometimes. You can enjoy doing both of those things and not have anything “wrong” with you in the way the movie would like to believe. 

Without the grisly ending (you’re always aware of what this all is hurtling toward, and Brooks isn’t that subtle with his foreshadowing, like when Theresa sees a nun on the subway), this movie on the whole could be pretty good — an unflashy but admiring portrait of this woman trying to figure it out’s life. But the murder angle gives everything an unpleasant victim-blaming taste — a bit like young women should watch it and make a conscientious decision to refrain from what its anti-heroine does. None of this is to say that what happened to Theresa doesn’t happen; we’re seeing this movie because it did. But in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, you sense the onus of Theresa’s demise being tacitly placed on her. The movie isn’t so much a nuanced look at the difficulties of sexual freedom in a patriarchal, misogynist society as it is a prestigiously made dramatization of promiscuity equaling dissatisfaction, destruction, and in some cases death. (And by so prominently positioning Theresa’s murder, like it happened with Quinn, on New Year’s Day, right after she tells a bartender that she’s going to stop drinking, stop living this life, the suggestion is that once you have lived like Theresa has, it may be impossible to be “redeemed” — as if one needs to be redeemed after living like she has.) Looking for Mr. Goodbar isn’t faciley dated, necessarily — instead evidence that its wrongheaded, still-persistent central idea has just continued finding new ways to mutate, existent before the film’s release and long after it.