Stanley Kauffmann

“Marsha Mason's face sets the tone of this comedy. In the heyday of magazines like Collier's, the illustration for the stories always had girls with snub noses. And they were snub-nosed stories, very pert and up-to-the-then-date. Mason has the same general type of face but more human--Jane Wyman with gonads. She's a very pleasant light comedian, and this script that her husband, Neil Simon, wrote for her fits her like a leotard….

“Some talents keep the fluff floating. First to the eye, Mason and Dreyfuss. They have the energy and precision of circus sharpshooters, knocking off the points and the quick emotions like bottles thrown in the air, never missing, firing over their shoulders, wheeling and smacking. Nothing is real, nothing if phony.

“…. [Simon] invents an absolutely incredible character hangup for his heroine--something about the courage to say goodbye in order to say hello again, and if I've got it wrong it doesn't matter--but it's only an attempt to paste some disguise of depth on one more boy-meets-girl polka.

“And of course there's the false realism. People simply don't speak incessantly in smart dialogue…. [O]ften in Simon's plays and films I find myself thinking, "Say, the folks who live in that apartment have pretty good scriptwriters."

“But if you accept the conventions, it glistens. If, mutatis mutandis, The Goodbye Girl had been made in the 1930s, it would now be revived as what art houses like to call a Comedy Classic.”

Stanley Kauffmann
New Republic, December 17, 1977