It is definitely a dark, ugly film, but given the godawful, hokum, mindless crap most 70s movies were (Smokey & the Bandit anyone?) it was strangely a breath of fresh air, in a way. Keaton was her absolute cutest, as was Tuesday Weld. I remember sitting up watching it on HBO in the late 70s just expecting a nudie wank-fest (I was like 13 or 14) and found it totally compelling, even then. SNL did a hilarious parody of it called **The Looking for Mr. Goodbar Sleepy Time Playset! **Gilda Radner played like a 12 year old girl and Dan Ackroyd was the off-screen announcer:
Ackroyd: “Now pick up the Diane Keaton doll, drink three tequila sunrises, now go out bar hopping until you get killed.”
Radner, after picking up one or two male dolls, picks up one and…
Ackroyd: “Uh-oh! You picked up the blond psychotic homosexual!”
Radner: “Does that mean I win?”
Ackroyd: “No it means you get killed!”
Radner then picks up a GI Joe and fights him off with it…
Well that changes everything! A detailed explanation of Calvinism! If I’d known it was Calvinism porn, I would have understood it was just a fetish I didn’t understand, instead of thinking it was a creepy, vile expression of antisexual feeling.
Mostly everything I had to add has been said but I will reiterate :). The movie is interestingly hard to find as it was indeed never released on DVD (your best bet is seeing it on late night cable as it does come up every so often) and it is very very '70s. Specifically Dark 1970s.
A couple of people have mentioned Tuesday Weld. Anyone looking for a good Tuesday Weld movie should check out Thief. It’s a 1981 movie with James Caan playing a bank robber. But it’s as much a character drama as a crime thriller.
Watching now. Wow…Richard Gere’s character in this movie is one of the best looking movie characters, male or female, I’ve ever seen. He’s so far on the “pretty” end of the spectrum, it’s astonishing that he was almost 30 when he played this role. He looks like a guy I knew in high school.
Diane Keaton isn’t bad either. She has the perfect Anglo/Irish face, especially in profile. Blythe Danner has it too. (I wish she was in this movie!)
Oh my GOD. The final fifteen minutes of this film - basically from the moment Tom Berenger first shows up until the end - might really and truly be the best piece of cinema I have ever seen. I am dead serious. Was Berenger nominated for or given some kind of award for his performance in this film? If not, he should have been. He should have won the fucking Oscar for his role in this movie.
Berenger’s performance is like a David Hurles “Old Reliable” photo in action. Such an unbelievable combination of charm and pure, animalistic, predatory menace. Good God. And the final flickers of Keaton’s face as her life fades away - the “last curtains of her dying brain” as J.G. Ballard wrote in Crash - maybe the most powerful portrayal of death I have ever seen on film.
I usually have a very good ‘retroactive’ celebrity eye, IOW when an actor becomes A-list I usually remember their older stuff. But when someone in this thread first mentioned him I though, “Tom Berenger? Who was he?”. Can’t believe he was the killer at the end!
I doubt I’ve seen it in 25 years but I remember so much of it so vividly. One scene in the middle when she’s trying to buy, coke I think, from the big black guy and he asks her for a dime (back then meaning $10) and Keaton literally hands him a dime coin. The black guy takes it and kind of laughs, grabs her purse, takes out $10, gives her purse back with the drugs, looks at the dime he’s still holding, then hands it to her and says, “Here, 'case ya gotta call Jesus”!
Something I also now remember: There was a TV commercial, which must have been for the book, that consisted of just a shot of a ransacked bedroom and I think an unmoving woman on the bed (mostly under the covers), and audio of a landlady knocking and calling the woman’s name. Then a narrator saying something about how ‘She went home with a different guy every night, last night she picked the wrong guy’ or something similar.
Unfortunately Berenger was not nominated for an Oscar (or anything else) for the role. The film was nominated for 2 Oscars: the Cinematography and Tuesday Weld Best Supporting Actress.
