New York, New York

Love with the Proper Stranger. This romantic comedy-drama succeeds in spite of itself, for it is brimful of enough warmth and hip humor to mask a decidedly rancid plot. The girl Angie (Natalie Wood) is a clerk at Macy's. The boy Rocky (Steve McQueen) is a part-time musician temporarily bunking with a nightclub stripper, Edie Adams. One day at Rocky's union hiring hall, Angie appears and tells him: "I'm gonna have a baby." He blinks at her, then: "Congratulations." He can't remember the girl's name, and has to strain to recall their brief affair at a resort in the mountains. He agrees to help her "find a doctor." Love comes later, when they get to know each other.

Such pulpy reel-romance recalls the tenement symphonies of the '30s--working-class misery in a minor key. Going from bad to worse, one long scene is awkwardly underscored by a title song, Hollywood's most lamentable habit these days. And the squalid abortion episode is mere nonsense. A moral issue is raised, then sidestepped by presenting a slovenly midwife who totes a flashlight and performs her dark deeds on the floor of a vacant flat. This of course makes abortion conveniently unthinkable.

Happily, the movie soon rises above downbeat sociology. Filming in Manhattan, Producer Alan J. Pakula and Director Robert Mulligan (the To Kill a Mockingbird team) have not only caught the flavor of the city--they have imbued it with a gritty freshness all their own. An Italian neighborhood springs to life in one vivid scene set against the background of a concrete piazza, where the men play bocce while the women pull food out of brown paper bags. Some of the film's funniest moments involve Tom Bosley as Angie's feverish, fumbling suitor. One look from her and he becomes accident-prone, breaking dishes, bumping into furniture, incurring minor fractures, yet somehow suggesting that most of the real hurt lies deep inside.

The rough-textured dialogue is delivered by a cast of pros. "You're a sex maniac," purrs Edie Adams laconically, as McQueen ogles her thigh. His approach varies little, for it needs no improvement. Later, getting a clear fix on Natalie's decolletage, he makes a pass in the offhand manner of a man who takes his love the way most people take after-dinner mints. But Actress Wood matches McQueen quip for quip, twitch for twitch, shrug for shrug, smile for winning smile. Both coruscate with the sparkly stuff of which movie stars are made, and their final clinch in front of Macy's Herald Square, proves again that after all is seen and done Hollywood still produces the best brand of boy-meets-girl-meets-girl .

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