Molly Haskell

“The fault is not with Herbert Ross…, who gets wonderful performances from his leads…. Marsha Mason, radiant with a homey sensuality, delivers each one-liner as if it were something a frowsily distracted Mom might actually say….

“As the ex-dancer who gave it all up for love, Mason (the real-life Mrs. Simon) is forever saying good-bye to her own sunshine boys… She is, in effect, the soulful, Earth Mother doormat of the kind played with freckled charm by Shirley MacLaine in the fifties. Then women could legitimately surrender independence on the altar of matrimony, with a statistically--if not spiritually--higher chance of success. But in the seventies there is something wrong with the picture. Why isn't this woman, with a school age child to raise, working?”

[Haskell notes inconsistencies in the characters, such as Paula's shock when Elliott has a woman in his room and her inability to deliver her spiel at the automobile show without breaking up.]

The laughs in The Goodbye Girl, like the happy endings…, are dictated by literary opportunism rather than character continuity….”

Molly Haskell
New York, December 12, 1977