If It Wasn't for the Nights is a fan-favorite album track from Abba's 'disco' album, Voulez-Vous (1979). It's musically effervescent but with near heart-breaking lyrics - a sad happy love song, europop, dance banger. Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977) is a famously muddled film, e.g., it keeps the book's ultra-shocking ending but makes its protagonist, Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton) more fun-loving than (the book's) self-destructive, dramatizing her inner life with amusing fantasy sequences that are more Molly Dodd or Ally McBeal than Wild Strawberries or The Exorcist, say. In this vid., I use Abba's great disco-hit-that-never-was-but-should-have-been as a clue to how to edit together some of LFMG's lovelier set-ups and facial acting from Keaton to arrive at
Theresa Dunn, happy-sad rom-com heroine á là Fran Kubelik or Charity Valentine, only at the height of both disco and scuzzy, dangerous, '70s NYC/Chicago
At any rate, IIWFTN deserves to be much better known than it is (if only Madonna had covered it on MDNA...).
