Grade: D+
Synopsis: A young woman (Natalie Wood) discovers she’s pregnant after a one-night stand with a jazz musician (Steve McQueen).
Love with the Proper Stranger is a modest comedy-drama that unfortunately doesn’t age well, for a couple of reasons.
The first and most obvious is that despite its premise involving pre-marital sex, it’s still mired in 1950’s sensibilities. We’ve got Natalie Wood’s brother’s chasing her and Steve McQueen all over town for no good reason, an abortion scene that’s so overplayed it looses any real dramatic impact, and, well… Tom Bosley.
This brings us to the second problem, namely the casting. Wood’s fine, but McQueen’s part seems tailor written for Paul Newman, who made his big break seven years earlier playing a New York boxer in Robert Wise’s Somebody Up There Likes Me. That’s not to say McQueen’s bad, just that he never really seems comfortable with the part, and it shows.
That said, Love with the Proper Stranger isn’t an awful film, just a dated one whose appeal is somewhat limited to prior generations and fans of the leads, though, surprisingly, it does present a more realistic lead in Wood than it’s modern day remake, Knocked Up (2007), whose protagonist doesn’t even consider, let alone explore, the abortion option.
