The movie opens with a wide shot of an unoccupied hotel ballroom in New York City. It's empty. One person enters, then another, then another. Slowly but eventually the empty space is filled with activity. In a way, that scene, that hotel ballroom, represent the hearts of the two lead characters that we will meet. They're two young, lonely people who will find love. This 1963 relase from Paramount Pictures is LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER starring Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen. It brought Natalie Wood an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.
LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGE is one of the many movies I watched and enjoyed for the first time while sitting behind my parents in the backseat of the family car. We were at the drive-in theater in Los Angeles for another family night out, another double feature. I was way too you understand the more mature elements of the film. Nevertheless, I was so happy to be in the backseat because my crush on Natalie Wood was already underway. On local TV stations, she'd won my little boy heart when I watched her as a little girl in MIRACLE ON 34th STREET and as a young woman in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, CASH McCALL and MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR.
As I grew up, I'd watch LOVE WITH PROPER STRANGER on television or on a VHS tape that I'd rented from my video store. My affection for the film always increased. I related to Angie and Rocky, the characters played by Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen. They were two young and single adults from Italian-American families in New York City. No, I'm not Italian-American and I'm a native Los Angeleno. But I am Catholic and I understand how religion probably added extra limitations to their lives in the same way they felt overwhelmed from the suffocating love of their families.
Rocky is a hip musician. Angie is a clerk at Macy's (site of the MIRACLE ON 34th STREET). The two meet and had a one-night fling. Angie gets in contact with Rocky because she's pregnant.
Angie is a smart, sophisticated woman. She was not being a tramp. She was not being slutty. Angie was lonely and needed to feel some kind of affection that did not come from her family. And she was a young woman with normal desires.
Being a fellow Catholic, I understood how Angie and Rocky were under the thumb of the corporate rules of our religion. The rules and the punishment. First of all, sex is something you have only with your spouse and only after you're married. Then, sex is primarily for the purpose of procreation -- to bring other Catholics into the world. That means sex is to be more a duty than a pleasure. Like filing your taxes. On top of all that, using protection and/or a birth control device is absolutely forbidden for both the female and male.
If an unmarried Catholic woman has sex, gets pregnant, makes a choice of terminating the pregnancy and dies after getting hit by a beer truck while jaywalking, her immortal soul would toboggan down to Hell in a heartbeat.
Rocky arranges for Angie to have an illegal abortion in the meat packing district of Greenwich Village, a district pretty much closed and unoccupied -- in those days -- on the weekends. When she sees the ugliness of the procedure's preparation, she is wracked with horror and levels of Catholic guilt. Her hysteria in that scene is justified.
Rocky will be her savior. More so than the corporate rules of her religion. Angie and Rocky will no longer be strangers. But they'll still have to move on from the suffocating love of their relatives.
LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER still holds a special place in my heart. I got a TV job offer from New York City in 1985. I took it! The offer was a dream come true. It was while in New York that I grew a deeper connection to the movie. For 10 years, I lived in a modest studio apartment on 21st Street at 7th Avenue. Every time I walked up 7th Avenue and either passed or went into Macy's, I always smiled and thought of the final scene in LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER with "the bells and the banjoes."
I had fallen in love with a proper stranger. Like Angie, he was a clerk in a New York City department store.
Here's a trailer for the movie.
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