User Reviews

The film was noteworthy because it showed how Maggie (Kim Novak) was ripe for infidelity: her spouse was cold to her and her mother knew it. It was interesting how her mother said "told you so", having warned her not to marry her conventionally-handsome husband. Maggie's mother caught on to the chemistry between her daughter and her passionate neighbor at once, because it was what she wanted for Maggie all along. Kim's longing for love was also revealed by her confession about a dalliance with an outspoken truck driver. Wouldn't you know the driver catches the twosome dining at an out-of-the-way restaurant, hurling insults at her for dropping him. Kim Novak took the cold facade/hot interior combination so beloved by Alfred Hitchcock to another level. It is significant that that the story took place at the end of the conservative Fifties, just in time for the turbulent Sixties.

Kirk Douglas, still pumped up from Spartacus, fills out an array of knit shirts and chews a thoughtful pencil as a "serious" architect trying to balance his personal integrity with his suburban lifestyle (materialistic wife, snot-nosed kids -- the full disaster, as someone once said). Into his fading dreams comes the stunning Kim Novak... bruised, hurting, and longing for love so much she's practically falling out of her cashmere sweater. They sneak away to a beachside roadhouse for martinis and you can guess what happens next.

Except you can't, really. Some commentators on this board have called this a soap opera, but in fact the strength of the movie is that it avoids cliché at every turn. The illicit lovers elicit only sympathy (sorry, edwagreen, you really need a remedial writing course) as they encounter every real-life obstacle that adulterers are prey to -- socially awkward patio parties, lies stretched to the breaking point, shameful discovery -- and eventually spread damage and heartbreak to each other and those they care about most.

And so the great Richard Quine takes Evan Hunter's overcooked potboiler of a novel and turns it into a small classic -- full of a delicate sadness "worthy of Ophuls," as critic David Thomson put it. The movie has its nostalgic charms: an L.A. with smogless skies and plenty of room for building a new house; Walter Matthau as a neighborhood wolf (his leering advice to his 9-year-old son is priceless); Barbara Rush as the wife (I liked one poster on the old AMC site who beautifully summed her up as a "tight package"); and Ernie Kovacks as a semi-sleazy writer who gets some life lessons from Douglas.

It also has moments of quiet emotional truth and one is particularly poignant: Douglas and Novak meet accidentally at a kiddie park and haltingly talk through their situation, realizing how hopeless it is. When I was a lad, my parents took me to this exact same amusement park; it was on Van Nuys Boulevard in the Valley, next to Ho Toys Chinese restaurant, glimpsed briefly in the background. The intersection of my childhood and adult perspectives in this scene fairly blew my mind... "Strangers" is a perfect time capsule of Los Angeles in 1960, but it's also quite timeless.

This might contain possible spoilers. First off, this is Kirk Douglas in one of his usual roles ( he was once quoted as saying "I've made a career of playing s.o.b's). Kim Novak is quite nice as the wife who doesn't get the total affections of her husband and falls into a relationship with a married man (Douglas). I saw this film on AMC and if you can record it please do, because this film is currently unavailable. It is one of the best films that depicted suburban 1960's Los Angelas. Walter Matthau's performance was probably the best in this film. The scene where he encounters Douglas on the patio at the party and informs him of his knowledge of the affair is really good. Then at the end when he confronts Douglas's wife (Barbara Rush) is disturbing. Matthau was alway's a great actor. The music is pretty good, Ernie Kovaks does a good job also. This is pretty much a chick flick but worth it.

This movie was a disappointment to me. I had hoped that it would be something like "Brief Encounter", but with more attractive leading actors. And it is - partly. The romance is there.

But it is interspersed with social realism, the psychoanalytic lingo that was so common in novels and movies in the 1960:s, an unhealthy atmosphere overall among the middle-aged couples in the upper middle-class neighborhood, a lot of talking and reasoning... It is also much too long and partly tedious.

All this does not fit into a romantic love story. The most incongruous thing of all, however, was the end music: an angelic choir with a sugar-sweet, romantic song, that should have been just right in an animated Disney Princess movie... I wonder what the person who chose that end song was thinking about..? :-O

Despite from my criticism above, I think there are good scenes too that illuminate the disastrous situation that I think most of us at least brush against at on time or other in our lives. I.e.: to fall in love with someone who is already married, or to fall in love with someone else while one is oneself married. Or both, as in this film.

For instance the scene when Kim Novak, playing the unfaithful wife, is walking around in the private rooms of her married lover and his wife. The look of all the little intimate things THOSE two share - the bed, the towels, the toilet utensils, and not least the kid who suddenly appears in the door - suddenly makes her understand what it is she is trying to destroy. A marriage and a family. That scene is superb!

It is interesting to compare this drama of adulterous passions in the suburbs with a brilliant comedy of the late 1940s. In 1948 Cary Grant and Myrna Loy had problems getting a country house in MR. BLANDINGS BUILDS HIS DREAMHOUSE. A dozen years later we have Ernie Kovacs approaching architect Kirk Douglas on building him a private home in California, while Douglas is approached by Kent Smith with at least one or two major projects. Grant, in the late 1940s was complaining about spending at least $15,000.00 on the entire project. That represented at least one third of Grant's income. In this film Douglas is getting the princely sum of $5,000.00 for building a modern plant for Smith, and gets 10% of the total cost of the construction of the house for Kovacs. Today, of course, Douglas would be getting nothing less than $60,000.00 for his architectural planning, while the whole of the house for Kovacs would probably cost at least one million dollars. Boy, what does this tell us about inflation?

Evan Hunter's story STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET is set just when suburbia was becoming a permanent fixture in American society. The idea that the prosperity of the upper middle class could not bring true happiness was dimly perceived. The idea that one could be sexually starved, as Kim Novak is here by her husband (John Bryant), or that a decent wife like Barbara Rush could be pushed aside by her decent husband (Kirk Douglas) struck us as incredible. Yet we see that the suburbs contain passions that can explode. At best they are controlled like that of Novak and Douglas for each other - when they carefully plan to meet occasionally at distant bars and hotels. At worse you have marvelously interesting character of Walter Matthau. Apparently a conservative type (pipe smoking, hater of smutty jokes), Matthau actually is interested in sexual conquests all over the place - and actually tries to force himself on a humiliated (and alone) Rush when Douglas is out of the house. When Douglas reacts properly and socks Matthau, our Walter looks at him from the ground, smiles, and sneers, "How are we that different?" Douglas is now the one who is humiliated.

There is a hint at universal sexual desires here that are beyond marriage. Novaks mother (Virginia Bruce) has also apparently done something in her past that Novaks uses to silence her (unfairly) at times - but Bruce senses that Novak's relationship with Bryant is faulty because Bryant is such a stiff boy scout type (Novak tries to get him to go to bed with her at one point when he returns from work - wearing easy to rip off clothes to entice him. His reaction is to say he wants to change his shirt!). Even Kovacs shows a sexual urge that is not satisfied by a single lady - he has a series of different type of short-term girlfriends. But Kovacs is also wishing he could find a perfect lover.

The acting in this story is actually quite good. Douglas is convincing as adulterous husband, lover, penitent, and architect (the detail scenes regarding the construction of Kovacs' home, and the discussions with Smith of his two schemes for Douglas are quite convincing, with talk of studying terrain and such showing they know what a gifted architect actually would do). Novak's failure (despite having one of the most alluring of bodies in that movie period) to get a proper response from Bryant is fascinating (one recalls the reverse reaction she got from Jimmy Stewart in VERTIGO). One has to hand it to Bryant too in those scenes - a less than known actor he does show a tired husband who is truly tired. Rush manages to be convincing as a caring wife - she does not hesitate to be argumentative when she feels Douglas' career ideas are wrong (he wants to concentrate on his modern private houses, not on grandiose schemes). The sole weakness in the film is one of a debatable point. Having nearly been raped, she is aware the rapist based his views on Douglas' behavior - and she ends her best scene insisting he leave her and their sons and never come back. But in three minutes (supposedly after a couple of hours of crying) she is ready to beg Douglas for a reconciliation. Is this a sop to audience tastes to preserve a "happy home", or does Rush's character genuinely still love Douglas? A nice question to consider.

Then there is Ernie: Kovacs, the early television comic genius, made less than ten films in his lifetime. He only had two years left after STRANGERS before the auto crash and hairline fracture ended his remarkable career. This is his only really serious film in all of them. He was a western villain in NORTH TO ALASKA, but he was barely in control of events against John Wayne and Stewart Granger. Here he is not a villain, but a writer who is confronting a perennial problem: he has had great financial success with two best sellers that the public liked, and the critics panned. The novels are being turned into movies. Who can ask for anything more? Well Ernie does - he wants to write what he really feels, but he is uncertain if it will be successful or not. Kirk and he, both of whom share an artistic desire to excel, become friends in the film, and the latter pushes Ernie to write his heartfelt novel. Kovacs carries out the project, and is successful at the end with the critics. Here Kovacs had few chances to joke about as in a film like OPERATION MADBALL or THE FIVE GOLDEN HOURS. But he carries off his role well indeed. It makes one realize that his car accident not only took away a comic genius, but possibly a fine dramatic actor as well.