"Love with the Proper Stranger" tells the story of two young Italian-Americans from New York. Angie Rossini a shop girl at Macy's department store, and Rocky Papasano, a jazz musician, have a brief affair, as a result of which Angie finds herself pregnant. Angie tracks Rocky down, hoping that he will pay for her to have an abortion, something which was still illegal in the 1960s.
The film is an uneasy mixture of two genres. The earlier part seems like an American version of the British social-realist "kitchen sink" dramas of this period. There is the same documentary-style black-and-white photography, the same concentration upon the seedier elements of working-class life, the same dance-halls and crowded, run-down apartments. I was particularly reminded of "A Kind of Loving" and "A Taste of Honey", both of which deal with the subject of an unmarried girl getting pregnant, a subject which would have been a controversial one on both sides of the Atlantic in the early sixties.
Abortion was an even more controversial subject at this period than unmarried motherhood, so it was a brave move on the part of the film-makers to tackle it. Neither Angie nor Rocky raise any moral objections to the procedure, even though she was raised in a Catholic family who would have regarded abortion as a mortal sin. They only back out when Rocky discovers that the abortionist is not medically qualified and refuses to let Angie go through with the procedure, realising that a crude backstreet abortion would be very dangerous. It struck me, in fact, that the film-makers were arguing for abortion to be legalised to make it safer and to prevent young women from risking their health in this manner.
After the abortive abortion, the tone of the film changes to that of a romantic comedy. Rocky proposes marriage to Angie but she turns him down, well aware that he is doing so not out of love but out of a sense of moral duty and under pressure from her family. Another suitor for Angie's hand arises in the shape of the unattractive cook Anthony. Anyone familiar with the conventions of the rom-com will be able to work out the ending from here.
The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, although three of those (for art direction, cinematography and costume design) were in categories reserved for black-and-white films, at a time when most films were being made in colour. (Separate black-and-white awards were to be abolished after 1966). It brought Natalie Wood the second of her two "Best Actress" nominations (she was to lose to Patricia Neal), and while Wood's performance as the naive but determined young Angie is a reasonably good one, it didn't really strike me as being of Oscar-winning calibre. Steve McQueen is also good as Rocky.
The kitchen-sink films of the sixties are very much of their time, but that does not prevent their being of interest to the modern viewer, both as dramas and as pieces of social history, and I felt that "Love with the Proper Stranger" might have been more interesting had screenwriter Arnold Schulman and director Robert Mulligan made it as a straightforward social-realist drama without trying to turn it into a standard rom-com halfway through. It has its good points, but overall cannot compare with "To Kill a Mockingbird", Mulligan's great film from the previous year. 6/10
The film is an uneasy mixture of two genres. The earlier part seems like an American version of the British social-realist "kitchen sink" dramas of this period. There is the same documentary-style black-and-white photography, the same concentration upon the seedier elements of working-class life, the same dance-halls and crowded, run-down apartments. I was particularly reminded of "A Kind of Loving" and "A Taste of Honey", both of which deal with the subject of an unmarried girl getting pregnant, a subject which would have been a controversial one on both sides of the Atlantic in the early sixties.
Abortion was an even more controversial subject at this period than unmarried motherhood, so it was a brave move on the part of the film-makers to tackle it. Neither Angie nor Rocky raise any moral objections to the procedure, even though she was raised in a Catholic family who would have regarded abortion as a mortal sin. They only back out when Rocky discovers that the abortionist is not medically qualified and refuses to let Angie go through with the procedure, realising that a crude backstreet abortion would be very dangerous. It struck me, in fact, that the film-makers were arguing for abortion to be legalised to make it safer and to prevent young women from risking their health in this manner.
After the abortive abortion, the tone of the film changes to that of a romantic comedy. Rocky proposes marriage to Angie but she turns him down, well aware that he is doing so not out of love but out of a sense of moral duty and under pressure from her family. Another suitor for Angie's hand arises in the shape of the unattractive cook Anthony. Anyone familiar with the conventions of the rom-com will be able to work out the ending from here.
The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, although three of those (for art direction, cinematography and costume design) were in categories reserved for black-and-white films, at a time when most films were being made in colour. (Separate black-and-white awards were to be abolished after 1966). It brought Natalie Wood the second of her two "Best Actress" nominations (she was to lose to Patricia Neal), and while Wood's performance as the naive but determined young Angie is a reasonably good one, it didn't really strike me as being of Oscar-winning calibre. Steve McQueen is also good as Rocky.
The kitchen-sink films of the sixties are very much of their time, but that does not prevent their being of interest to the modern viewer, both as dramas and as pieces of social history, and I felt that "Love with the Proper Stranger" might have been more interesting had screenwriter Arnold Schulman and director Robert Mulligan made it as a straightforward social-realist drama without trying to turn it into a standard rom-com halfway through. It has its good points, but overall cannot compare with "To Kill a Mockingbird", Mulligan's great film from the previous year. 6/10