Looking for Mr. Goodbar (4K UHD Review)
- Review Date: Mar 17, 2025
- Format: 4K Ultra HD
-
Director
Richard BrooksRelease Date(s)
1977 (February 25, 2025)Studio(s)
Paramount Pictures (Vinegar Syndrome)- Film/Program Grade: B-
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: B+
- Extras Grade: A+
Review
Given the A-list talent involved, Looking for Mr. Goodbar isn’t usually considered to be an exploitation film, but that’s exactly what it is: a full-blown Reefer Madness for the Sexual Revolution. Just like that film milked irrational fears about the elusive spondulix, the unholy weed, Looking for Mr. Goodbar exploited societal fears about where the Sexual Revolution might be heading. There’s always been a reactionary element to the cinema, from the way that Dirty Harry reflected anxieties about recent Warren Court opinions regarding the rights of the accused, or how Red Dawn, Rocky IV, and Top Gun provided jingoistic anodynes to the discomfort of Cold War era concerns. Whenever there are trends to be exploited, the movie business has always been ready and willing to do just that.
Yet even exploitation films themselves are frequently reactionary, taking advantage of these broader cultural anxieties in order to make a buck. The entire slasher movie cycle of the late Seventies and early Eighties can be seen as a partial reaction to the dissolution of sexual mores during the Sixties and Seventies, which is one reason why these films so often equate illicit sex with death. As a result, it’s sometimes difficult to draw a clear line between B-movie exploitation and “serious” dramatic efforts, with the only real difference being the pedigrees of the cast and crew involved—which is a purely arbitrary distinction. Films like The Exorcist removed those distinctions by completely obliterating any such lines, mixing A-list talent with naked exploitation of what Stephen King called “the unease generated by changing mores.”
Four years after The Exorcist broke box office records, Looking for Mr. Goodbar briefly became number one at the domestic box office in late October of 1977. The summer of Star Wars had become the fall of western civilization as seen through the eyes of the fictional Theresa Dunn. Yet in the best spirit of exploitation, Dunn had a real-life antecedent, and that’s where the film successfully cashed in on equally real cultural fears that had been engendered by the Sexual Revolution. Looking for Mr. Goodbar is based on the 1975 novel by Judith Rossner, which was itself inspired by the murder of Roseann Quinn in 1973. Quinn was a teacher at St. Joseph’s School for the Deaf in the Bronx, and her active night life led to her inviting the wrong man back to her apartment, John Wayne Wilson, who stabbed her 18 times before fleeing the scene. (He ended up hanging himself while he was incarcerated awaiting trial.)
In writer/directors Richard Brooks’ adaptation of Rossner’s novel, Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton) is a virginal young college student who starts an affair with her married professor Martin (Alan Feinstein), and that’s only the beginning of her sexual awakening. As she gains her degree and gets a job teaching deaf students, she also starts to explore that sexuality in increasingly risky fashion. Her parents (Richard Kiley and Priscilla Pointer) warn her of the dangers involved with her new lifestyle, and her sister Katherine (Tuesday Weld) is a living object lesson about what can go wrong. Yet Theresa continues down her chosen path, experimenting with drugs and having increasingly dangerous sexual encounters with the likes of Tony (Richard Gere). Eventually, that leads her to a fateful encounter with Gary (Tom Berenger), who ends up acting out his rage at being unable to accept who he really is. Looking for Mr. Goodbar also stars William Atherton, Julius Harris, LeVar Burton, and Brian Dennehy.
If that description sounds a little lurid, well, welcome to Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Brooks had a way of blending realism with stylization in films like In Cold Blood, where Conrad Hall’s lushly romantic black-and-white cinematography drew a contrast with the documentary level of detail derived from Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel. With Looking for Mr. Goodbar, he contrasted the grit and grime of Theresa’s nighttime milieu with melodramatic visualizations of her fantasy world(s), and the two facets sometimes exist uneasily side-by-side. And however gritty that the film’s settings may be, the melodrama extends to some of Theresa’s actual experiences, with prurient details that sometimes veer dangerously close to Reefer Madness territory. It’s a borderline cartoonish representation of the excesses of the Sexual Revolution, once again blurring the lines between serious drama and naked exploitation.
That even extends to the harrowing finale of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which has a sharp contrast between the horrifyingly realistic way that Brooks filmed Theresa’s fateful encounter with Gary and the exaggeratedly stereotypical way that Brooks treated Gary himself. The real John Wayne Wilson was a gay man who struggled with accepting his own sexual orientation, and it was his inability to perform with Quinn that led to him violently acting out against her. The novel and the film preserved that aspect of the true story, but dealing with that angle required a level of sensitivity that Brooks didn’t display in his adaptation. Instead, it’s the gay man as monster, tortured by his own repressed feelings and psychologically unstable as a result. Even the real John Wayne Wilson was a bit more nuanced than his doppelgänger in the film, however monstrous that his murder of Roseann Quinn may have been. But Brooks wasn’t operating with much nuance in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, driving his themes home with a sledgehammer instead.
Still, sledgehammers can be remarkably effective in exploitation films, and there’s no doubt that Looking for Mr. Goodbar touched a nerve in 1977, the same way that Judith Rossner’s novel had struck a nerve two years previously. Social movements always result in backlash, and the backlash against the Sexual Revolution was still in force in the late Seventies. The AIDS epidemic during the Eighties further fueled that backlash, and the films of that decades responded by turning a bit more puritanical. Looking for Mr. Goodbar remains a fascinating reactionary snapshot of the intersection between the Sexual Revolution and Seventies cinema: it took advantage of the collapse of the production code in order to address sexuality and violence in openly graphic fashion, and yet it’s ultimately as moralistic as anything that had been approved by the Hayes Office. To paraphrase Eli Cross, it’s wagging a finger at us, and yet there’s no denying that finger-waving can be effective in the right hands. Whether or not Richard Brooks was the right hands remains an open question.
Cinematographer Williams Fraker shot Looking for Mr. Goodbar on 35mm film using Panavision Panaflex cameras with spherical lenses, framed at 1.85:1 for its theatrical release. This version is based on a 4K scan of the original camera negative, cleaned up and graded for High Dynamic Range in both Dolby Vision and HDR10. Aside from a few small scratches and other debris in the opticals during the opening credits, the rest of the film looks much more pristine—but adjust your expectations, because Looking for Mr. Goodbar rarely resolves 4K worth of detail despite the fact that it was scanned from the camera negative. Fraker mimicked the dichotomy inherent to Brooks’ approach by lighting everything naturistically, but then he applied diffusion and/or fog filters to the camera for most of the shots. It’s a style that could best be described as muted grittiness. Combined with the stocks that he used, the grain is prominent throughout, and yet the inherent softness to the image still gives everything a hazy look. The HDR grade generally respects this low-key approach, although a few of the flesh tones do display the typical Vinegar Syndrome exaggerated reds. While there weren’t many improvements to be made in the contrast range, the HDR does really enhance the strobe light sequences, enough so that anyone with sensitivities should proceed with caution. It also makes the final sequence even more unbearable, so be forewarned that sensitivity to flashing lights may be the least of your problems when watching Looking for Mr. Goodbar in HDR.
Note that there was an issue with the Dolby Vision layer on the initial pressing that caused it to freeze the disc on some combinations of players and displays. Vinegar Syndrome instituted an automatic replacement program to resolve the issue (the corrected discs display “V2” at the end of the text on the rim). I tried both the original disc and the replacement and didn’t have issues with either of them, but since I’m running a projector, I’m not dealing with Dolby Vision anyway.
Audio is offered in English 2.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio, with optional English SDH subtitles. It’s a clean, balanced track with clear dialogue and no issues with noise or distortion. Despite being mixed in mono, there’s a decent amount of depth and dynamics to the music, both in the score by Artie Kane and the various songs on the soundtrack. Speaking of which, there have been legal issues with that soundtrack that kept the film off home video for decades, and this version does appear to have at least one alteration in that regard. When Theresa visits her sister’s apartment at 32:25 and they’re watching a stag film while smoking grass, Frank Sinatra’s 1954 recording of All of Me could be heard faintly in the background (although in the only VHS rips that I could find, it’s been pitched up slightly, so it doesn’t sound like Sinatra). That’s been replaced in this version with an unidentified generic jazz tune instead—If anyone can identify it, please let me know. It’s a small price to pay in order to get Looking for Mr. Goodbar on home video again, but caveat emptor.
The Vinegar Syndrome Limited Edition 4K Ultra HD release of Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a two-disc set that includes a Blu-ray with a 1080p copies of the film. The insert is reversible, featuring alternate artwork on each side. There’s also a spot gloss hard slipcase/slipcover combo designed by Dylan Haley that’s available directly from Vinegar Syndrome, limited to 8,000 units. That version also offers a 40-page booklet featuring essays by Marya E. Gates, Marc Edward Heuck, Elizabeth Purchell, and Jourdain Searles. The following extras are included, all of them in HD:
DISC ONE: UHD
- Audio Commentary by Gillian Wallace Horvat
DISC TWO: BD
- Audio Commentary by Gillian Wallace Horvat
- First Comes the Word: Richard Brooks and the making of Looking for Mr. Goodbar (23:32)
- Studs Terkel Interview with Judith Rossner (13:04)
- Defining Autonomy: The Trial of Looking for Mr. Goodbar (30:41)
- Original Trailer (2:45)
- Radio Spots (1:44, 3 in all)
The commentary features filmmaker and author Gillian Wallace Horvat, who spent some time researching the film in the papers held in the Academy repository at the Margaret Herrick Library, including some of Richard Brooks’ own papers. As a result, she’s able to offer a wealth of information that’s not readily available elsewhere, starting with the complicated history of the opening title montage (while he’s not credited in the film, Saul Bass was involved until the sequence evolved beyond his intentions and he asked for his name to be removed). From there, she works her way to the no less complex history behind the actual production of the film. Brooks wasn’t entirely happy with Theresa’s character in the novel, so he supplemented his adaptation with his own research into the nightlife scene, but Horvat acknowledges that he didn’t always understand Theresa’s psyche and that results in some inconsistencies in the film. Horvat also describes the evolution of the shooting script and the ways that it ended up differing from the book, and spends some time examining different interpretations of the ending—including her uncomfortable personal experiences after watching a repertory screening at the New Beverly Cinema. It’s a great track.
First Comes the Word is an interview with Douglass K. Daniel, author of Tough as Nails: The Life and Films of Richard Brooks. It continues the trend of having people with real, direct knowledge about the subject involved with the extras, and it’s a valuable overview of Brooks’ career and his experiences making Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Brooks needed a hit at that point, and while Rossner’s novel may not have seemed like natural material for him, it gave him the success that he needed. He told producer Freddie Fields that he thought the book was “a piece of shit,” but he felt that he could do something with it. He was confident enough to write the script on spec and take Guild minimum fees for writing and directing the film, with a piece of the back end instead (something that must have paid off when Goodbar became a hit).
The Studs Terkel Interview with Judith Rossner takes the trend of direct knowledge one step further by returning to one of the sources. It’s an audio-only interview between Terkel and Rossner from 1976 that aired on WFMT Radio in Chicago. They discuss the murder of Rosanne Quinn and how Rossner fictionalized it—and Terkel clearly read the book before he sat down with her, which is a nice change of pace compared to most of the much shallower interviews that we get today. (As a side note, Rossner’s speech patterns are remarkably similar to Diane Keaton’s, enough so that the two could occasionally be mistaken for each other.)
Defining Autonomy is a seven-part audio essay by Brent Cowley that examines Looking for Mr. Goodbar from a completely different angle: the obscenity trial that followed its theatrical release in Utah County. Cowley briefly traces the history of county regulators censoring films before launching into the legal battle over Looking for Mr. Goodbar. It’s a good reminder that the fall of the old Production Code and the rise of the MPAA ratings system didn’t spell the end of local battles over how to define obscenity.
There aren’t any missing extras from previous releases of Looking for Mr. Goodbar for a simple reason: there haven’t been any. While the film was released on both VHS and LaserDisc, it’s never been available on any digital format since then due to the rights issues with the music—and the LaserDisc was bare-bones, too. So, to say that Vinegar Syndrome’s new 4K release of Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a big deal would be a massive understatement. While it’s not the kind of film that benefits the most from the 4K treatment, as long as they’ve got access to the original elements and the 4K scans, why not? It’s rare for a film to make the leap straight from VHS and LaserDisc to UHD, and Vinegar Syndrome has now pulled that off twice in the last several months. By default, that makes it one of the most important releases of the year, and the fact that it includes genuinely interesting extras certainly doesn’t hurt. Highly recommended.
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).