Knocked Up By The Proper Stranger

Last year’s megahit, "Knocked Up," shocked & awed critics & audiences with a combination of raunch dressing on top of an insubstantial salad.

Judd Apatow, the writer / director, had cut his teeth writing for "The Ben Stiller Show" and "Larry Sanders," found his voice with "Freaks And Geeks" and hit big with "The 40 Year Old Virgin." He is now a "brand." Echoing from the Hollywood Hills, you can hear producers shouting at writers from within their sealed window offices: "Make it more ‘Apatow’."

While Apatow's film was about a pregnancy, adult responsibility, and love - ingredients in Hollywood’s cook book since its beginning - part of the shock was that such an old dish could still be so yummy. The subject has been treated mostly as melodrama as far back as the silent era. In the 30's it was meat for the women’s weepies, Stanwyck, et. al. Mixing the drama with laughs was rare.

The one night stand -> pregnancy was the premise for another film, one I saw recently: "Love With The Proper Stranger," released in 1963. Comparing it with "Knocked Up," separated by 44 years, reveals something about our times that should also shock and awe.

In "Knocked Up," rotund stoner man child Ben Stone (Seth Rogan) gets lucky with hottie Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl) and she shows up weeks later with the news. Her motives are a bit fuzzy: abortion is barely considered even when she is reminded of the genetic risk when meeting Ben while she is sober. The rest of the movie consists of mutual embarrassment situations until Ben realizes that growing up is survivable after which she can accept him as a mate and father of her child.

"Love With The Proper Stranger" was a big budget studio film, a star vehicle for Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen, complete with the mandatory title song written by Johnny Mercer and sung by Jack Jones. The director was Richard Mulligan, following his success the prior year with "To Kill A Mockingbird". It was written by Arnold Schulman, who began as a writer of teleplays in the 1950's and had previously written "A Hole In The Head" for Sinatra.

Way back then as today (and if not, soon), technology was altering the moving picture business. Millions who ten years before had gone out to movie houses now stayed home to watch T.V. where they could see free dramas (live full length original ones written by the likes of Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky), comedy (live skits written by Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart), sitcoms, variety, talk, celebrities.
Hollywood had to scramble to show stories T.V. couldn’t touch.

One strategy was the epic spectacular, in wide screen, color, with casts of thousands. This novelty had worn off by 1960, when "Cleopatra" nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox. A second route was the cheap exploitation drive-in teen slasher film. Small budgets but small, though sure profits. European films pointed to two more channels: realism and explicit sex.

The typical studio responses were the timid sex comedies in the Doris Day style, tepid variants of the stale screwball genre of the Thirties & Forties. But a few filmmakers of the time, working within the studio system, managed to mix the old reliable Hollywood romance with some serious issues treated realistically but with wit and a deft touch of style. Billy Wilder was a genius at this. His European sensibility, hovering between Lubitsch and Sunset Boulevard, led him to edgy comedies: "Some Like It Hot" with its transgender confusion and "the Apartment," about a corporate yes man who falls for his boss's suicidal mistress.

"Love With The Proper Stranger" is set and filmed on location in New York in the chill fall, a black and white unglamourous city of working class people who live in small apartments. It begins in a musician’s union hall where Rocky Papassano (Mc Queen) is conning himself into a job and avoiding one of his many girls. Angie Rossini (Wood) shows up and he barely remembers her from "The Mountains" where they had their one night together that summer. She needs his help to find a doctor. Rocky flops sometimes with a stripper (Edie Adams), who throws him out when he asks for her help with his problem.

Rocky isn’t much different from Ben Stone almost a half century later. Both begin as blissfully avoiding the responsibilities of manhood until faced with the crisis. Angie and Alison, though, seem to be distant sisters, living in different Ages.

Alison is a far more independent woman. Though she lives in her sister's pool house and views her marriage as a scary model, Alison has a career. Angie works the sales floor at Macy’s and lives with her mother and brothers in a tiny apartment with no privacy, trapped by the constraints of their demands that she marry, continue the old country traditions. While her fling was also a reckless whim, soon regretted, the consequences she faces are far more dire than Alison’s.

She and Rocky scrape together money for a back alley abortion, to be done by a shady couple on the floor of a vacant apartment in a condemned building. When Rocky protests and Angie breaks down, the romance begins with a saving embrace.

The script then reverses tone with a comic scene when Rocky takes Angie to sleep in his stripper friend’s bed. When Rocky returns with Angie’s brother (Herschel Bernardi) and a black eye, the men have solved the problem: Rocky is now willing to marry the girl to make it right.

Now is the time for Angie to grow up. She is not satisfied to do the traditional thing. She declares her independence, moves into her own apartment, and the romance can resume and end happily when Rocky realizes that, after all, he does love her (to the surprise of no one).

A final embrace in a crowd of curious real New Yorkers in the middle of 34th Street fittingly climaxes a film that makes skillful use of New York exteriors to create the mood approaching realism.

Of course, serious issues are completely irrelevant to the success of "Knocked Up." It thrives on clever dialogue funning the childishness of the boys — Ben and his crew of geeky stoner buds and Alison’s brother-in-law, Pete (Paul Rudd), who is suspected of an affair but turns out to be in a fantasy league with his pals.

The women in this our world of today are on serious career tracks while the boys are clinging desperately to their adolescence. It seems that forty years of sexual evolution have permitted the tentative Angies to morph into the secure Alisons of our time, but the Rocky’s of olden days haven’t kept step. In fact, they’ve regressed into Bens and Petes, soft and cuddly but barely adequate mate material.

Let’s face it, the battle of the sexes is over. And we lost.