Double Whammy

Looking for Mr. Goodbar is the sort of clever trashy novel out of which a talented director could have made a better than average movie. Needless to say, a good script would also have been required. Unfortunately, Judith Rossner’s book got a poor scriptwriter as well as a crass director—both in the person of Richard Brooks—a double whammy no work could survive. What the film could have taken over from the novel and developed further is the quiet sordidness of a grey, petty-bourgeois, sin- and sickness-haunted childhood falling prey, as it grows into womanhood, to megalopolitan amorality. Everything would have had to be kept. low-keyed: Theresa, the limping, unbeautiful, freckle-faced redhead, moving from an oppressive home life into an unliberating liberation; the singles bars that had not yet gone disco and offered only booze and the promise of one-night stands; and, somewhere in the background, Theresa’s daytime existence as a dutiful schoolmarm.

Brooks was not content to mine this minor vein. Instead of an acridly detailed New York, he creates, by conflating various towns, an Unreal City under the brown fog of William Fraker’s moody cinematography. Instead of a run-of-the-mill Catholic upbringing and parents who just did not pay much heed to Theresa, he comes up with a fanatic father and a dithering mother; above all, the girl herself has to be made much less damaged in body and considerably prettier, thus removing the principal sources of her insecurity.

JS

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John Simon

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Looking for Mr. Goodbar is the sort of clever trashy novel out of which a talented director could have made a better than average movie. Needless to say, a good script would also have been required. Unfortunately, Judith Rossner’s book got a poor scriptwriter as well as a crass director—both in the person of Richard Brooks—a double whammy no work could survive. What the film could have taken over from the novel and developed further is the quiet sordidness of a grey, petty-bourgeois, sin- and sickness-haunted childhood falling prey, as it grows into womanhood, to megalopolitan amorality. Everything would have had to be kept. low-keyed: Theresa, the limping, unbeautiful, freckle-faced redhead, moving from an oppressive home life into an unliberating liberation; the singles bars that had not yet gone disco and offered only booze and the promise of one-night stands; and, somewhere in the background, Theresa’s daytime existence as a dutiful schoolmarm.

Brooks was not content to mine this minor vein. Instead of an acridly detailed New York, he creates, by conflating various towns, an Unreal City under the brown fog of William Fraker’s moody cinematography. Instead of a run-of-the-mill Catholic upbringing and parents who just did not pay much heed to Theresa, he comes up with a fanatic father and a dithering mother; above all, the girl herself has to be made much less damaged in body and considerably prettier, thus removing the principal sources of her insecurity.