- Steve McQueen and Natalie Wood in Love With the Proper Stranger
Over the past few months, I’ve been delving into the work of director Robert Mulligan, a veteran of early TV who went on to a respectable—though now largely neglected—career in feature films (I wrote about some of my discoveries here). Recently I watched his Love With the Proper Stranger in the same week I caught up with Inside Llewyn Davis, and I was surprised by how much the films had in common. Stranger came out in 1963, just two years after Davis takes place; both are set in New York City and feature an unsuccessful musician as the main character; and in both the hero’s recruited by a former one-night stand to arrange an abortion. These similarities may be coincidental, but then the Coen brothers display greater affinity than most of their peers for earlier eras of Hollywood filmmaking (in most of their period pieces, the dialogue evokes how people spoke in movies at that time). It’s not unlikely that they screened Mulligan’s film when they were writing theirs.
I wonder if the entire film was constructed around this episode, which outshines the remainder of the film in terms of seriousness and intensity. Prior to the early 1960s, the Production Code forbade Hollywood from making movies in which the heroine considers having an abortion. Proper Stranger comes from a transitional period after the Code was loosened but not yet eliminated completely, when American filmmakers began cautiously approaching subject matter that had been off-limits for so long. In a sense, the film’s story—of two emotionally arrested characters thrust into adulthood—is a perfect vehicle for the growing pains of the era.
