Ripped from the Headlines! by Schechter Harold

Author:Schechter, Harold
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542041805
Publisher: Little A
Published: 2020-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977)

DIRECTED AND WRITTEN BY RICHARD BROOKS. WITH DIANE KEATON, TUESDAY WELD, WILLIAM ATHERTON, RICHARD KILEY, RICHARD GERE, AND TOM BERENGER.

An unpleasantly puritanical air pervades this 1977 adaptation of Judith Rossner’s runaway bestseller. Essentially, it is a finger-wagging, tongue-clucking attack on the excesses of the freewheeling, pre-AIDS 1970s, when—according to the vision of screenwriter-director Richard Brooks—homicidal gays ran rampant on the streets of New York City and every block featured a swinging-singles bar patronized by predatory studs and lonely young women cruising for casual pickups.

Diane Keaton stars as Theresa Dunn, one of the more winsome of these desperate, doomed females. Brought up in a repressive Irish-Catholic household, Theresa suffers from a deep-seated sense of insecurity, having been afflicted with scoliosis (curvature of the spine) as a child. Though smart, beautiful, and totally dedicated to the deaf students she teaches at her day job, Theresa is hopelessly screwed up when it comes to her personal relationships. She despises the handsome, idealistic “nice young man” who pursues her (William Atherton). Sweetness and devotion leave her cold; what really turns her on are humiliation and mistreatment, which she receives in abundance from her many sex partners.

After a long-term affair with her insufferable, married college professor, she plunges ever more deeply into a life of sordid one-night stands with a string of increasingly questionable characters (the most memorable of whom is the insanely narcissistic street tough played by Richard Gere in his first major role). Theresa picks up one stranger too many when a sexually confused former convict (effectively portrayed by a young, Brandoesque Tom Berenger) savagely murders her, to prove his masculinity, at the film’s powerfully unsettling climax.

In creating the fictional Theresa Dunn—her innermost fantasies, feelings, desires, motivations, et cetera—Judith Rossner relied primarily on her own imagination. The basic story of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, however, was inspired by a shocking true-life crime, the brutal 1973 murder of a twenty-seven-year-old New York City schoolteacher named Roseann Quinn.

Like her fictional counterpart, Quinn—the oldest of three children of devout Irish-Catholic parents—developed scoliosis as a child. At thirteen, she had a spinal operation and spent a solid year recuperating. The procedure helped straighten her crooked shoulders but left her with a pronounced limp, an eleven-inch scar on her back, and a profound sense of insecurity, alienation, and self-contempt.

Rebelling against the conservative values of her parents—who expected her to fulfill the traditional roles of housewife and mother—Quinn left home at eighteen, enrolled in a state teacher’s college, became involved in the 1960s civil rights movement, and started dating African American men. Eventually, she moved to an apartment in Manhattan. By day, she tended to live a quiet, sedate life as a teacher (first in the public schools of Newark, later at St. Joseph’s School for the Deaf in the Bronx). At night, however, the petite, freckle-faced redhead turned into a boisterous, sexually promiscuous party girl, picking up disreputable-looking strangers at neighborhood bars and taking them home for bouts of rough sex.

The last stranger she would ever pick up was a young man named John Wayne Wilson.

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