Looking For Mr. Goodbar · The Maltese Falcon

The crime
The murder of Roseann Quinn.

The story
Written and directed by Richard Brooks, 1977’s Looking For Mr. Goodbar adapts Judith Rossner’s novel that fictionalized Quinn’s murder, not Lacey Fosburgh’s “interpretive non-fiction” account of the same crime, so it’s trying to do slightly different things and make slightly different points. It’s also trying to do and make too many things and points, I think; there is a sense of Brooks becoming…narratively overwhelmed, I guess? And retreating to what he sees as the safety of 1) collaged scenes that might actually have happened, but might also have only existed in the mind of the Quinn surrogate, Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton); and 2) theatrical speechifying about childhood secrets and the Church etc. etc., often by performers who can’t quite pull it off (Richard Gere’s Tony is particularly exhausting).

But the occasionally amateurish screeching, the dated dialectics about love and loneliness in late-seventies New York City…the script itself is in search of something, doesn’t quite know what, and blunders around a bit trying to find itself, so it works on a meta level. Keaton’s performance as a woman doing the same ties it together, smoothing over the herky pacing of Theresa’s downward spiral and lending credibility to a final scene that must have been incredibly tough to shoot, emotionally and logistically.