Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [62]
LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER OPENED ON CHRISTMAS Day 1963 to mixed-to-negative reviews but did critic-proof blockbuster box office. Bosley Crowther, at the time the bearer of the cinematic standard for the New York Times, the culture-and-arts paper of record, was not a Steve McQueen fan and let him have it with both ink-stained barrels: “He’s a face-squinching simpleton, for my money.”
Archer Winsten, one of the more literate New York film critics, wrote in the New York Post, “McQueen does not strike one as belonging too successfully to this Italian family.”
Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice, never a big fan of Richard Mulligan despite the director’s having been anointed by François Truffaut to be the American keeper of the French-originated auteurist flame, was not impressed by the politics (as opposed to les politiques) of Mulligan’s films. He found To Kill a Mockingbird’s antiracist themes racist in their condescending treatment of Tom Robinson, the black innocent played by Brock Peters (if, for example, Robinson had been found guilty rather than killed escaping, the film might have been more compelling) while overlooking the children’s point of view, which made the film so memorable (Sarris, childless in real life, was rarely impressed with children’s films, or children in films). Sarris dismissed McQueen’s performance as overly mannered. Himself a product of New York’s outer boroughs, he found Mulligan’s neorealist film of working-class romance much too forced and fatally artificial.
Newsweek, meanwhile, had no such problems with Steve’s performance; acknowledging not just his work in Love with the Proper Stranger but his four star turns that year, it declared, “Steve McQueen’s splendid amalgam of blinks, furrowed brows, smirks, quick smiles, pursed lips, shyness, catlike grace and occasional clumsiness is one more explosion of the four-part firecracker of his career for the year.”
The joint power of Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen was enough to make the film one of the top moneymakers of the year, where it settled in as the thirteenth-highest grosser, with an initial domestic theatrical take of nearly $6 million, solidly profitable, if not an all-out blockbuster. By contrast, the top-grossing film of the year was Cleopatra, which earned nearly $26 million but whose costs drastically exceeded that. Compounded with the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton scandal, the film all but put 20th Century Fox out of business.1
Perhaps even more impressive were the five Oscar nominations Love with the Proper Stranger received. Natalie Wood got the only one of the “big-four” nominations (actor, actress, director, picture), for Best Actress, but lost to Patricia Neal, who won for her performance opposite Paul Newman in Hud. Hal Pereira, Roland Anderson, Sam Comer, and Grace Gregory were nominated for Best Black and White Art Direction/Set Decoration, Milton R. Krasner was nominated for Best Cinematography, Edith Head for Best Black and White Costume Design, and Arnold Schulman for Best Writing (Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen). Despite Newsweek’s strong lobbying for Steve to get a Best Actor nomination, it didn’t happen, and even with his much publicized “retirement,” he was openly disappointed about it. (Earlier in the year, he had been nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor, awarded by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, for his performance in Love with the Proper Stranger, but lost to Sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field.)
That year the Oscars themselves were in one of their downward arcs of popularity, as evidenced by the low ratings for the broadcast hosted by Jack Lemmon and the general disinterest among the younger members of an industry coming apart at its corporate seams. Where once attendance was all but mandatory for those nominated, a total of fifty-seven failed to show up on April 13, 1964, at Los Angeles’s Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. The widespread absence was due in part to the industry dismay at the Cleopatra debacle, which had put another wound in the belly of the dying