Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [58]
The plot concerns a young, single, struggling union nightclub musician, Rocky Papasano (Steve), who has a one-night affair with a shopgirl by the name of Angela Rossini (Natalie Wood). She lives with her Italian working-class family in cramped everybody-shares-one-bathroom city quarters. They meet during a weekend getaway each took separately. In the style of fifties movies, she was a “good girl” looking for love that would eventually lead to marriage and freedom from her physically and emotionally repressive home life, while he was simply looking to get laid (we don’t see any of this; we learn about it later). They run into each other again not long after (this we see), only this time she is pregnant, the result of their weekend fling (it is when we learn they actually slept together). They agree she should get an abortion, still illegal at the time, but at the last minute, in a scene that is horrifically realistic, Rocky decides he can’t go through with it, presented to us as he can’t let Angela go through with it. They break up but eventually come together again, and the film ends with an uncertain hopefulness that they will somehow move beyond their initial physical attraction and together find real, committed love, marry and live happily ever after.
Steve wanted to play Rocky Papasano for several reasons (even if he could not pass for Italian in a million years): he wanted to work with winning talent, and Pakula and Mulligan were at the top of their game; he was familiar with the New York street milieu in which the film was set; and he wanted to do a one-on-one romance opposite a beautiful leading lady, something he had not yet attempted on-screen.
But perhaps the thing that made it most irresistible to Steve was that Paul Newman, who had pushed through to the stratosphere in his kitchen-sink drama, Robert Rossen’s 1961 The Hustler, had considered taking the role in Love with the Proper Stranger before turning it down to play the devastatingly good-looking, coldhearted bastard in Martin Ritt’s Hud. Newman had previously worked with Natalie Wood in Victor Saville’s awful sandals-and-robes The Silver Chalice (1954), in which Newman was crucified by the critics and his film career nearly ruined. Wood had had only a small part in Chalice—she was still considered a juvenile at the time—but already had a reputation as a Dietrich-like mankiller who had to sleep with every leading man.
Steve, as always, wanted to outdo Newman, his self-perceived biggest rival, and he was certain Rocky Papasano was the perfect role for that. Steve was always more “street” than Newman, both in real life and in the way he came across on-screen. He had always looked a bit haunted, eyes a bit hollow, with owl-like rings under them when shot from certain angles. And his shoulders were hunched, as if he walked with a combination of perpetual fear and manic distrust. All of this had been minimized in his previous features by Hollywood’s obsession with emphasizing classic male beauty in its leading men. Now, through Papasano, he wanted to portray a young man the camera would clearly show had been beaten down by loneliness and failure.
Whereas Newman’s portrayal of pool-hall savant “Fast Eddie” Felson in The Hustler was that of a young and beautiful loser longing to leave his existential hell, Steve’s Papasano meandered aimlessly through those no-exit depths. Newman’s Felson was a passionate artist with his pool cue, while McQueen’s Papasano was a cold wanderer with his music—the crucial character difference between these two otherwise similar-looking black-and-white films about the pursuit and consequences of love.
Steve wanted to be in the film so much that he readily agreed not to do any racing during its on-location shoot. Much of Love with the Proper Stranger was shot in New York City in March 1963, with five days’ worth of interiors added in Hollywood that April. The New York production schedule gave Steve and Neile a chance to revisit the early days of their romance in the place where they each had made their professional breakthroughs.