Case history of a singles'-bar swinger, chronicled in full from Irish Catholic virginity to Sexual Revolution martyrdom. Richard Brooks, the writer-director, crams the movie with teasers of various types and of dubious merit. He noncommittally offers up several large clues to the heroine's self-destructive, self-debasing nature, plus, for added "psychological insight," several ludicrously overstated fantasy sequences (in one, she imagines herself winning an Olympic Gold Medal for figure skating; in another, her father, lying in his coffin, opens his eyes Count Dracula-style and laughs maniacally). He also throws in a whopper of a red herring -- namely, the heroine's job as a patient, compassionate, and miraculously successful teacher of deaf children -- in order to build her up as a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure, "Saint Theresa by day, Swinging Terry by night." And to give the story an admonishing Puritanical tenor, he ghoulishly plants several foreshadowings of Swinging Terry's inevitable bloody demise (why inevitable? why not surprising?). It's all laid on a bit thick and a bit fast. With Diane Keaton, Tuesday Weld, William Atherton, Richard Kiley. (1977) — Duncan Shepherd
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