Excellent romance and interesting 1960s time capsule
"The times, they are a'changin'." – Bob DylanArguably director Robert Mulligan's best film, "Love With The Proper Stranger" is a charming romantic movie about a carefree jazz musician (played by the charismatic Steve McQueen) who has a brief romantic affair with a shop-girl (played by the cute Natalie Wood) and inadvertently gets her pregnant. Rather than face her strict Italian-American family, Steve and Natalie decide to find a back street abortionist, but chicken out once the weight of what they intend to do hits them. Steve, a progressive type who sees no reason to get married, let alone limit himself to one woman, and Natalie, who sees no reason to stay with a man who doesn't adhere to her romantic and fantastical notions of true love, then part ways and go on with their lives. Of course, over the film's final hour they are slowly drawn back together and fall in love.
The film's low key direction, excellent performances and lively location shooting in New York's Little Italy are top notch, but what makes the film interesting is the way it captures a mood shift in the US. This was an era of second wave feminism, contraceptives, women's liberation movements, free sex and abortion. As such, this film is filled with young people turning their backs on customs, values and family/religious codes and nervously testing the waters of the sexual revolution. By the film's end, pre WW2 romantic values and the liberative force of the 1960s, as well as issues of social norms, family obligations and personal independence, have all been reconciled. Cue the obligatory happy ending.
The film was deemed sensational and risqué back in the 60s, but is pretty much status quo today. On the plus side, the film's aesthetic, which mixes fairy tale notions of romance with gritty black and white cinematography and grungy cinema verite techniques, is still pretty unique. In the following decades, cinematic feminism would take the form of "bionic women", "action heroines", chicks with "buns of steel" and leotard wearing ladies with cellulite busting super powers. Two steps forward, one step back.
8.5/10 – Worth one viewing. Part of a wave of 60's gender cinema ("The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", "Shampoo" etc etc)
score /10
tieman64 18 January 2011
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2371630/34895
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