Should Diane Keaton have been double-nominated, in 1977, for ANNIE HALL and LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR?
With their new rules, the Academy has upturned quite a number of Oscar traditions and stats. For example, actors can now fill more than one slot in each category, receiving nominations for multiple performances in a race. Looking back, it’s fun to speculate about what performers might have achieved this. Indeed, I might write something on that matter later on. Immediately, though, one case stands out. Part of it is that Be Kind Rewind’s video essay is still fresh in the memory. Part of it is that the loss of such a star still stings. Regardless, upon reading the news, I immediately latched onto the idea that Diane Keaton would have gotten two Best Actress nominations in 1977. She won for Annie Hall, but was just as tremendous and lauded for her work in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
This all serves as a preamble for another announcement. My Oscar completism project is back on track, as I try to watch every single Academy Award-nominated performance. And since Keaton’s on the mind, especially Keaton in Mr. Goodbar, let’s explore Tuesday Weld’s Best Supporting Actress nomination for that New York drama. Also, Lovers and Other Strangers, which earned Richard S. Castellano a Best Supporting Actor nomination and got Keaton on Francis Ford Coppola's radar, effectively won her the role of Kay in The Godfather…
Tuesday Weld in LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977)
Nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 50th Academy Awards
Lost to Vanessa Redgrave in JULIA
Truth be told, I first watched Looking for Mr. Goodbar last year, reeling from Diane Keaton’s death and eager to discover one of her most acclaimed turns. What I found was a fascinating object of 1970s American filmmaking, rooted in social anxieties of the time in such a way that it can alienate modern viewers. They already alienated viewers back then, too. One should expect these things from the polemic material, as the flick, which adapts Judith Rossner’s 1975 novel of the same name, tells the fictionalized story of a real-life schoolteacher who was murdered by a man she met at a bar and brought back home for a tryst.
Moralistic, problematic, perverse, mad in both senses of the word, Looking for Mr. Goodbar is, nevertheless, enthralling and smart about the thrill of self-destructive behavior that’s only self-destructive because of other people’s monstrousness. It reminds me of Cruising and like a first, messy sketch of what Campion would later ace with In the Cut, no matter what naysayers think. Personally, I think people get too caught up in their own reaction to the film’s portrayed degradations. So much so that they miss the curious tension that lies underneath the shock value or the Old Hollywood lesson about fallen women and dangerous queers updated for New Hollywood.
Even if unintentionally, mainstream explorations of sex and trauma can have a lot to say. Moreover, they have a lot to offer in manner of seduction and disturbance, sinking their claws into contemporary mores and values to unleash repressed wants that social order oft rots into self-hatred. For sure, despite everything, Richard Brooks’ directorial excess doesn’t come at the cost of the camera’s kinship with his protagonist, Theresa. When she’s nighttime Terry, Looking for Mr. Goodbar is attuned to her attempts at finding fulfilment in all the ways her patriarchal society deems wrong. She’s not a victim of herself, she’s a victim to make insecurity and misogyny.
Does Brooks revel in her fate with some of the most striking, horror-adjacent work of his career? Yes, but there’s value in that nightmare, even if it’s discomforting or if it can be framed and weaponized as its own piece of conservative moralism. It’s not all the director’s work, of course. In many ways, Diane Keaton is the architect of Looking for Mr. Goodbar’s grasps at greatness, delivering a performance of supreme self-assurance that manages to fashion every strategy and trick with which she had built her reputation as a comedienne into a tool for psychosexual characterization. She looks so natural that I often found myself feeling like a voyeur, intruding upon a secret intimacy that wasn’t mine to see.
Alas, Academy rules meant Keaton couldn’t be honored for both this masterpiece performance and her genius turn in Annie Hall, so the only member of the Looking for Mr. Goodbar cast to earn their film some amount of Oscar glory was Tuesday Weld. She plays Katherine, Theresa’s older sister, whom their parents dote on and see as perfect when compared to their other daughter. However, the perfect sister doesn’t look so perfect when we first find her, in their parents’ Christmas-garlanded household, beset by chaos. People can barely hear themselves with the cacophony from outside and Weld enters the scene rankled, both by that pandemonium, as well as a body and mind giving up on her as she’s weighted down by the dregs of a marriage gone to seed.
Keaton says she’s perfect, but Weld isn’t interested in suggesting the woman who might deserve such praise. She’s much more committed to communicating the bone-deep mess of a woman who speaks like she’s drowning, running out of air with each word, sniffling as punctuation, popping pills and booze to put a period at the end of half-sentences. What a spectacle of self-pity, histrionics played to full blast, even as Katherine’s position within the domestic milieu feels secure. Nobody in her family is about to flake on her, Theresa least of all, so her loud terror feels closer to lunacy than justified panic. It’s all about destabilizing a film wholly built out of destabilization.
When she’s happy, coming home from a trip to get an abortion that turned into an impromptu marriage, Weld’s Katherine still moves like a woman dazed, breathless, unraveling. At a dinner party, she looks discombobulated, voice rasped up by what one assumes was a long day and night of ecstatic shouting as befits the hostess of a party where the guests congregate around homemade pornography. In that and other scenes, Keaton’s eyes are voracious, speaking of Theresa’s hunger and hungry curiosity. Weld keeps her own gaze diffuse, near blank, lost in thought or misery or the anesthesia of pre-orgy drugged-up debauchery.
Picked up at night by Theresa, talking about her new abortionist and the dereliction of her latest love, Katherine isn’t here, not really. Weld plays the tragedy of the fallen woman from a faraway place, so distant that it becomes somewhat abstract, as if she were lost within herself. It’s the hint of derealization that rankles most, way more disturbing than any of the unfulfilling libertinage she’s monologuing about. On another occasion, Weld manifests as a ghost in thick, glossy furs, dramatically misplaced in the milieu of Theresa’s abode, confronted by a histrionic Richard Gere and a random hookup her sister picked at the gay bar.
She feels incongruous, displaced from another movie, both more old-school glamorous and more slippery in tone and transgression. A dream melodrama, perhaps, for that is the kind of thing that would best contextualize her flight down the stairs to fight off Gere in a flurry of screeches and flittering blonde hair. And then the scene turns into a farce of sisterly care in the middle of a roach-infested dump, turning the tone on its head so suddenly it can’t help but feel perverse. Later, at a masquerade party, in the costume of killers, characters play a game of fake murder, and Weld screams with the hint of a giggle. Again, it’s perverse. And again, one is reminded that Looking for Mr. Goodbar thrives on perversity.
As a character, Katherine seems devised like an underwritten cautionary tale. And yet, Weld’s performance renders the woman much more bizarre than that moralistic premise might suggest. It’s an almost impressionistic characterization, or mayhap a piece of Fauvism transported from painting to acting. All broad strokes and bold color, making up a rough image whose misshapenness is deliberate. It’s an impressive feat, though I don’t think I could bring myself to vote for Weld over Vanessa Redgrave’s seminal work as the titular Julia in Julia. She’s still my pick for runner-up from that lineup, fascinating me more than Cummings or Dillon ever could. One need not even mention Leslie Browne, one of the very worst nominees in the category’s history.
12 Best Supporting Actress nominees left…
Richard S. Castellano in LOVERS AND OTHER STRANGERS (1970)
Nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 43rd Academy Awards
Lost to John Mills in RYAN’S DAUGHTER
Pairing Lovers and Other Strangers with Looking for Mr. Goodbar does the former no favors whatsoever. Adapted from Renée Taylor and Joseph Bologna’s 1968 Broadway play, Cy Howard’s film feels hopelessly stage-bound. Perhaps even worse, it often feels televisual, flattening opportunities for interesting blocking and ensemble dynamics through too-bright lighting strategies, a mise-en-scène that isolates its players, and a tedious affection for having a static camera mounted perpendicularly to some loud, patterned background. For a text about the chaos of interpersonal relationships, Lovers and Other Strangers arrives on screen with a stifling orderliness about it.
Nothing comes across as spontaneous or even a little bit alive, with most of the cast defaulting to the kind of acting one would expect from a theater with poor acoustics or a TV set intent on producing the next sitcom hit. Truly, these thespians are only doing what Howard’s direction seems to suggest and following a script that turns nearly everyone into a caricature, broad and loud and mechanical. In other words, it’s a deadened thing. It’s a farce staged with taxidermized character actors, an embalmed comedy of manners that only very rarely gains a pulse. Watching it, one spends the majority of time harkening for some perceivable heartbeat cutting through the layers of prosaic filmmaking and unpersuasive, unengaging humor, creaky jokes galore.
Thankfully, two performers seemed to have realized that a simple surrender to the project’s worst tendencies wasn’t the way to go. So, they save the scenes they’re in, acting like defibrillators zapping life back into this story of a couple finally getting married after “living in sin” and all the amorous troubles branching across their extended family. Who are these lifesavers in the Lovers and Other Strangers? Well, they’re Diane Keaton and Richard S. Castellano. He’s the father of the groom, while she’s the groom’s sister-in-law, who is on the verge of divorcing her husband and cutting ties with this family for good.
Starting with Keaton, the role is a tad thankless, though it’s preceded by quite the metaphorical drumroll. We’ve heard about Keaton’s Joan long before we see her, prompting the viewer’s imagination to devise what this dissatisfied wife must be like. Considering how demonstrative and high-strung most characters are, it’s logical to suppose Joan will be a harridan cartoon. What you get is quite different, as Keaton waltzes through the film’s third act wedding reception with a quiet sadness about her – the oversized bottom lashes help – and the general air of someone who’s bemused by what a big deal others make about what’s going on in her life.
She’s relaxed, vaguely distracted in that way that speaks of one’s comfort in their own skin. Her arc is defined by dissatisfaction, but still. That dynamic throws every scene partner for a loop, with Bea Arthur being especially mismatched to the melancholic cum unintentional hang-out comedic tone Keaton brings to the proceedings. And that makes unexpected sparks fly from the friction between the two of them. Honestly, I would’ve enjoyed Lovers and Other Strangers infinitely more if it had focused more exclusively on this family conflict rather than disperse its attention across a galaxy of bit players.
That’s even more true when you consider that the only other valuable piece of characterization in the entire flick also finds its best material in the impending divorce plotline. We first meet Frank Vecchio in a sitcom-ready tableau, an Italian-American household where the mother is overbearing and loudly critical of everybody in her vicinity, while the pater familias is a schlub quietly fuming under the pressures of his household. Their obvious unhappiness is a joke, yet Castellano doesn’t play the Vecchios’ marriage as such. Lovers and Other Strangers may regard its characters with mockery, but this particular performer isn’t too keen on mocking poor old Frank.
If anything, Castellano leans a tad too hard on a watery sort of pity, receding into himself when the viewer would expect him to pop off in some demonstrative bit of actorly business. A lot of it stems from his eyes, plaintive looking and framed by dark circles that give them a cow-ish woefulness. A lot of it is a direct product of line deliveries that dismiss punchlines, tossing jokes aside like used tissues. Consider the moment when mother, father, and eldest son stand off by the staircase. The younger man talks about needing happiness in marriage, to which his parents respond that they’re not happy and they’re fine.
It’s intended as a cruel lark for the audience, and Arthur plays it accordingly, staccato-like and precise. Her on-screen spouse, on the other hand, muffles half his words, cowers, mayhap ashamed by the sorry lesson he’s trying to impart to the prodigal son. During the reception, the parents try again, though they divide their attention. Unhappy husband goes with unhappy husband, while unhappy wife goes with unhappy wife, the older marrieds making the case for bearing down and enduring their shared misery with a happy face. If Arthur and Keaton offer a study in contrasts, so do Castellano and Joseph Hindy.
Only, in the guys’ case, it’s more a matter of one actor trying and the other merely standing there, not providing much in the way of anything to make the scene sing. These conversations are intercut between themselves and the other affairs going on at the wedding, forcing the audience to appreciate this scene as light melodrama in hiccupping stops and starts. Arthur’s aggressive tenor fits the cuts better than Castellano, who mostly comes across like a sad balloon sadly losing air over thirty sad minutes that are somehow meant to be funny. Emotionally, the actor delivers a cogent, resonant plea. Rhythmically and comedy-wise, it’s adequate if sabotaged by the flick’s form.
Since Castellano was part of the Lovers and Other Strangers original Broadway cast, I’m left to wonder if these things worked better on stage, where scenes might have had space to breathe rather than be crammed inelegantly into a new shape for a new medium. Oh well, he’s still one of the best things the movie has going for it, so I can’t complain too much. In fact, he’d have been a better winner than Mills in 1970. Then again, anyone would. As I find John Marley unremarkable in Love Story, my vote would have ultimately gone to Chief Dan George in Little Big Man from that lineup. Still need to see Gene Hackman in I Never Sang a Song for My Father, though I hear that’s an unforgivable case of category fraud.
47 Best Supporting Actor nominees left…
Looking for Mr. Goodbar is available to rent or purchase on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home. Sadly, Lovers and Other Strangers is currently unavailable on those platforms. But you can find it uploaded for free in various video hosting sites, including YouTube.