Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton) is learning to be a teacher for deaf children. She's sexually repressed with body shame around a scar on her back from a childhood surgery. She has an affair with her married university professor Martin. He breaks up with her leaving her distraught. She leaves her family to live on her own. She takes an interest in her student Amy. Amy's family including her brother Cap (LeVar Burton) is beholden to social worker James (William Atherton). Her sister Katherine (Tuesday Weld) is doing wilder and wilder things. She gets herself fixed. She frequents a bar and starts sleeping with nefarious Tony (Richard Gere) who gets her into drugs. She falls into the bar scene. In the end, she meets Gary (Tom Berenger).It's a meandering story which leaves the movie very scattered. Diane Keaton is great and keeps it together as much as possible. If this is a movie about a woman spiraling, it doesn't spiral fast enough. The most infuriating thing about the scattered nature is that the movie doesn't follow any one thread all the way. Theresa has a reveal that is slightly underwhelming. It needs to set up her father's character more powerfully before that can have its emotional impact. It also doesn't have the San Fransisco flavor. The most compelling aspect is Diane Keaton and the various great actors on the rise in this movie. It would help to streamline the cast of characters.

Directed by Richard Brooks, "Looking for Mr Goodbar" stars Diane Keaton as Theresa Dunn, a school teacher who seems prim and proper by day, but has clandestine sexual encounters with men by night. Brooks offers a number of trite explanations for Theresa's obsession with sex, but only one is interesting; as she suffered from Polio as a kid, Theresa believes that she is unable to give birth to a healthy child. Denied motherhood, she thus embarks on a kind of hedonistic night-life. When it was released 1977, many viewed "Looking for Mr Goodbar" as a supremely reactionary film. This is a flick about sexually liberated women who turn their backs to Catholic and conservative values, have lots of sex and are then beaten and stabbed to death by men. Gay men, meanwhile, are portrayed as sexually confused brutes who stab women as a means of assuaging their impotency around women. The supposed message: don't sleep around and stay away from crazy gays!Indeed, upon release, a number of Catholic priests praised "Looking For Mr Goodbar" and took out newspaper spreads promoting the film. To believers, "Goodbar" was touted as a "stern warning!" Brooks himself structures the film as a descent into hell, Theresa's basement apartment becoming increasingly dark and dingy as the film progresses. The film then ends with Theresa being killed in the shadows, Brooks focusing on a creepy freeze-frame of her darkness shrouded dead face. It's like an image out of "The Exorcist".But whilst "Goodbar" may be reactionary in some regards, Brooks also complicates things. His male characters are uniformly violent/disgusting and several sequences seem designed to bash conservative America (see Brooks' masterpiece, "Elmer Gantry"). The film seems less like a condemnation of the sexual revolution, than a nihilistic repudiation of everything, including sex; any of the men Theresa encounters could be killers.Elsewhere the film undermines anyone who might embody a traditional normality. University professors cheat on their wives and exploit female students, Theresa's own family unit is fractured, sustained by repressive illusion, and her father is a brute. Meanwhile, the men Theresa sleeps with dance with phallic switchblades or are ignorant of her needs. The film's gay murderer is himself not "crazy because he is gay", but because social forces won't allow him to be gay (he juggles a wife and an offensively portrayed, stereotypical gay lover). Theresa also echoes the gay character in complex ways. She is excluded from a normal life because of a hereditary disease, and is the victim of a society that assigns people fixed roles, imposing on them notions of what a "real man" or "real woman" should be. For Brooks, normality seems like a ideological construct, and violence arises more out of a cultural situation than individual responsibility. Complicating things further, the film's "love scenes" are shot to emphasise Theresa's pleasure and the bars she frequents are positively portrayed, and not hive's of debauchery.Regardless of the film's message, "Looking for Mr Goodbar" is a dull, repetitive film. It features a number of jarring flashback/fantasy sequences, is sensationalistic, flaunts its grime, is overly proud of its sleazier elements and wastes a strong performance by Diane Keaton.6/10 - Worth one viewing.

Not really. I have heard that there are no prints of this Movie although it is considered a classic. It is. Diane Keaton gives a powerful performance as a gifted teacher who frequents seedy bars and picks up men to one-night stands. Scary. Scarier is when she really picks up the wrong one.What a lot of people may miss in the movie is that Diane's character has a congenital medical condition (Scoliosis I believe) and does not want to marry a man and have a child with it. Pretty mild condition in my opinion to live your life this risky. She walks with what she thinks she pulls off as a little switch, but her untimely partner recognizes it as a mild limp because she did have surgery for it as a child.Her array of men are somewhat handsome losers with Richard Gere, John Travolta and Tom Berenger. All I want to do is see it again and have it in my collection!

Thersea Dunn (Diane Keaton) is a dedicated teacher by day. By night she cruises bars picking up men for increasingly violent sexual encounters. This leads to drug abuse and starts affecting her job. Can she stop? A VERY negative view of the swinging 70s before AIDS came about in the 80s. I originally saw this on TV when I was in high school where it was cut to ribbons and virtually incomprehensible. A revival theatre did show it a few months later so I got to see it uncut on the big screen. I was a little too young to understand it fully (a 10th grader doesn't know much about singles bars:)) but the message came through loud and clear--sex + drugs = death. There's more to it than that--they get into Dunn's family life and you see she grew up feeling neglected with an obnoxious loud father and a meek mother. There's also her sister Katherine (Tuesday Weld) who is also addicted to sex and drugs. Basically this is a very depressing film full of unpleasant characters and situations. Keaton is great in her role--she totally buried her "Annie Hall" image with this. She also did nude scenes which she previously refused to do. Weld was superb (and Oscar-nominated) for her role. It's also fun to see Richard Gere and LeVar Burton before they hit it big. Also a still unknown Tom Berenger pops up at the end in a very disturbing but crucial role. He had guts playing the role he does (I won't give it away). This movie has disappeared due to song rights (I believe) and that's too bad. It IS disturbing but an accurate portrayal of the dark side of the singles bars in the 1970s.