The very first couple of minutes of 1958 noir Never Love a Stranger are interesting. John Drew Barrymore stumbles out into the street after apparently having just taken a bullet to the chest. He gets in a car and tears off, swerving wildly until driving straight into a pillar. I was impressed to see the vehicle actually plow right into that, and hard.
Unfortunately, we next have the opening credits, and I was already doubting this was going to be any good. It may not be fair to let the song playing over the titles shape one’s opinion, but the title tune here is quite dreadful.
Things don’t look much more promising immediately afterwards, as a narrator takes us back three decades before the event we saw before those opening credits, in which the mother of Barrymore arrives at a midwife’s in preparation to birth him. When a movie’s flashback takes us all the way back to the birth of the main character, I never fail to recall the awful play Jack Carson’s cop is writing in Arsenic and Old Lace, which also begins at the beginning, when he is born.
The midwife puts the woman’s suitcase in the back of a closet, where it falls into the back and out of sight, something the woman comments upon as a frequent occurrence except she will forget about that suitcase for at least fifteen years. I guess no other luggage also fell back there in all that time. Alternatively, maybe the producers were hoping there could be a spin-off TV series in which the midwife goes to a different place each week to deliver yet another suitcase she only now discovered had been absconded by what I am now convinced is the only real incarnation of the monster that is in every child’s closet.
When Chekhov’s “luggage forgotten about for a preposterously long time” is finally discovered, the woman delivers this to the Catholic orphanage where Barrymore still lives, despite him being obviously waaay too old to be residing there. The contents of the case reveal the wee lad of 25 or so years of age to be of Jewish ancestry, and so he is expelled from the facility. Ah, exactly the kind of Christian generosity and understanding I have come to expect for so long, and which is increasingly rearing its ugly head in the present, what with increasing hostility towards immigrants and the rolling back of diversity policies.
The timing is a mixed bag, because he had been building a relationship with local gangster Robert Bray. Their first meeting is when a bar owner tries to kick the lad out of his establishment because he isn’t happy Barrymore had been giving customers shoe shines in it. A bar, gangsters and a shoe shine kit had me hoping in vain Barrymore would grow up to be Joe Pesci’s character in Goodfellas.
On the other hand, Barrymore had also just now been making friends with Steve McQueen, a fellow “teen” (?) who is being harassed by other neighborhood kids because he’s Jewish (??). Barrymore intervenes by slugging McQueen himself (???), an act for which he gets thanked by McQueen for “letting him off easy” (????).
Barrymore teaches McQueen how to box. An even better reason for our protagonist to visit his new friend’s apartment is Lita Milan. I never fully understood her relationship to McQueen and (otherwise offscreen) family. She and he have the same last name, but I believe her background is limited to being described as the household help. At this point, Barrymore doesn’t know he’s Jewish, but I wondered if it brought him any relief to learn he was, as going down on her would mean he’s eating Kosher.
But then everything is cut short because, as I mentioned earlier, he gets expelled from the orphanage. Naturally, he does the only logical thing and becomes a hobo. I wish Milan had yelled after him as he hops a boxcar a reminder to eat Kosher while riding the rails. Also, in scenes like this, I always think it would be hilarious if the character who jumps the train would be unaware it is actually coming to a stop instead of commencing a long journey. Just imagine a guy claim to have rode the rails—for roughly 50 yards.
After a montage of living rough, Barrymore returns to find McQueen is now the assistant D.A. Also, Bray and Milan are now an item, with him paying for her singing lessons. Actually, I suspect he paid for miming lessons, as that is what she does in a club to a few songs, including that terrible title number.
Barrymore goes to work for Bray as an enforcer, only to eventually become a kind of commissioner over all of the city’s various bosses. We do not see this as an evolution of the character. He simply asserts himself as the leader and that’s that. It is those kinds of lazy shortcuts which are the fatal flaw in an already shoddy construction of a film.
The film isn’t even interesting visually, except for a handful of scenes shot on actual New York City streets. A conversational commentary track on the blu-ray informs us one location is 91 Central Park West. Other than these few glimpses of natural environments, I believe every second takes place on sets of minimal design which betray the small funds available to the lowly studio which churned it out. One deeply terrible scene has Barrymore and Milan on a picnic on what may be the least convincing park set I have ever seen. Not only is the mix of buildings on the painted background an odd mix, but I swear the perspectives aren’t even correct.
I love noir and tend to be generous in my assessment of pictures in that genre. But Never Love a Stranger is a lousy movie, no matter how one tries to spin it. In the end, it only comes right back to where it started before the credits, without really taking us anywhere in the moments in between. Almost forgot: Barrymore’s character is named Frankie, yet nobody thinks to suggest he go to a place I think is inevitable, and that is Hollywood.
Dir: Robert Stevens
Starring John Drew Barrymore, Lita Milan, Robert Bray, Steve McQueen
Watched as part of Kino Lorber blu-ray boxed set Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XXIII