Between Purity, Sexual Corruption and Maternity -- Sexual and Ethnic Ambiguities in Love with the Proper Stranger (1963)

Abstract

"Love with the Proper Stranger" tells the story of an Italian-American young woman Angie, who finds herself pregnant after having a romantic encounter with an Italian-American musician Rocky, and she asks him to find a doctor for her. In their thwarted attempt to abort the child, the two of them begin to develop some affections, and after some twists and turns, the story ends with Rocky’s proposal to Angie. While Mulligan lightly summarized it as a story of “falling in love in reverse,” and the screenwriter Arnold Schulman also joked it as “A funny thing happened on the way to the abortionist . . .”, the film was actually quite bold in the time of its release, and shed light upon larger themes including ethnicity and gender. Although it ends with a potential marriage, the story is based on a premarital sex that results in pregnancy, and despite the strained effort to reframe the “one night stand” in a marriage, the film makes breakthroughs in terms of its shaping of its female protagonist, embodying up-to-date ideas about gender and sex while providing us with a somehow fresh view of third-generation Italian-American families. This paper will argue that by depicting Angie, a third-generation Italian American woman’s story, this film expresses some of America’s cultural anxieties in a period of transitions of 1960s. The Italian ethnicity of the main characters helps the film to construct the conflicts between family and individual, between the good old values and the new liberalist beliefs.Meanwhile, the film leaves much ambiguous space in terms of Angie’s Italianness and sexuality. By rendering her Italian ethnic marks almost invisible, as well as hiding her romantic sexual encounter behind her pure image, the film represents a time of rapid changes, where ideological and moral problems are left unresolved.