In 1963, the same year that Steve McQueen became America’s favorite action hero via his role in The Great Escape, he also starred in a modest romantic drama opposite Natalie Wood. Its name was Love with The Proper Stranger. It was a black-&-white indie (though released through Paramount Pictures), shot on and around the streets of New York, by director Robert Mulligan and his longtime producing partner, Alan J. Pakula. The two men, both early television veterans, specialized in small, tough, relatively low-budget films that appealed to audiences tired of Hollywood glitz and glamour. The duo triumphed in 1962 with their film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, which was to win three Oscars, including a Best Actor statuette for Gregory Peck. Today it seems obvious that a strong film based on Harper Lee’s classic novel would reap generous rewards at the box office. But such was not the thinking in the early Sixties, when studio films played to audiences looking for romance and fancy clothes.
One year after To Kill a Mockingbird, Pakula and Mulligan were back with a film that was in fact a romance, though hardly a conventional one. Steve McQueen plays an out-of-work jazz musician, first seen trolling for gigs at the local union hall. There he’s confronted by Natalie Wood, a pretty young clerk at Macy’s. He has no recollection of going out on the town with her, but apparently he’s left her something to remember him by. Yes, she’s pregnant. Though she’s hardly the weepy type, he’s by no means a heel eager to escape responsibility. Calling in favors from his live-in girlfriend (Edie Adams), he locates an abortionist who’ll take care of matters in an empty apartment for a substantial fee. (It’s a plot detail that’s starting to feel all too modern, now that Roe v. Wade is history.)
In a film that makes much of ethnic identity, both Wood’s and McQueen’s characters are the products of close-knit Italian families (Yup, we’re supposed to buy McQueen’s Rocky as Italian.) Wood’s character, Angie Rossini, lives at home with a domineering brother (Herschel Bernardi), as well as an old-world mama who wants her to stay on the straight and narrow. When she can’t bring herself to go through with the back-alley abortion arranged by McQueen, she tries dating a klutzy middle-aged gent who adores her and is willing to claim the baby as his own. (He’s played by none other than Tom Bosley in his first film role, long before he became the beloved paterfamilias on TV’s Happy Days.) Alas, the match doesn’t take.
Meanwhile, Angie’s indomitable spunk is starting to endear her to McQueen. (Given the strong ethnic vibe in this film, it’s easy to see her as a close cousin to Cher’s Oscar-winning Loretta Castorini from 1987’s Moonstruck.) I suspect you can guess what happens at the end, though in the case of these two firebrand lovers, nothing is going to come easy.
Mulligan and Pakula must have liked working with both McQueen and Wood. In 1965, the two actors starred in separate Pakula-Mulligan projects. McQueen took the lead in another raw romance, Baby the Rain Must Fall, while Wood played the title role in the downbeat story of a Hollywood star-in-the-making, Inside Daisy Clover. Though they made a rather gorgeous couple, they never shared the screen again.The gritty but ultimately hopeful Love with the Proper Stranger is well worth seeing, both for its atmospheric look at ethnic New York and for the pairing of two stars on the rise. (It’s fun to imagine what a McQueen/Wood baby might look like!)
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