Strangers When We Meet

Strangers When We Meet is a love story with elements of Casablanca, if one can imagine the noble American romantic as a thinking ex-GI of the new middle class in midcentury suburban Los Angeles.

Larry Coe (Kirk Douglas) is an independent-minded architect who broke away from a conventional career path. His dilemma is whether to break away from a conventional marriage. This write-up includes no plot spoilers.

Sixty years on, this film gives a natural portrayal of how the world looked to the rising middle class in the postwar period. The consumer middle class was a new thing. It was the backbone of the so-called Greatest Generation, a product of the Depression, the war, and the postwar economic boom. Nearly everyone we see except for maids and nannies is "white" and from a variety of elsewheres. Many in the new socioeconomic mainstream did not lead the lives their parents lived; they felt that their new status put them within reach of an elite which at the time was white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. People formerly excluded, now college-educated by the G.I. Bill and prosperous, could fit in and advance. Their success made this pattern a model.

But to fit into what? The elephant in the room was artificial social conventions that made for a one-size-fits-all, vanilla standard that suited no one. In this story we see middle-class people enjoy society’s relishes and privileges in the context of conformity to this standard which looks more like mutually-assured misery. It may explain why the Greatest Generation drank so much; it leaves little doubt that the artificial standard fostered the rainbow of social liberation movements just over the horizon.

The film's title is referenced in a comment by Coe’s principal client near the end: “We meet as strangers and then half the time we part that way. Yeah, and if we ever really get to know another human being, it’s a miracle.” That said, it is interesting to watch how people without smartphones are better listeners and attuned to reading each other’s body language and gestures.

Coe is a “wonder boy” architect who quit the firm rat race with an ambitious vision for his life and his work. Roger Altar (Ernie Kovacs), a writer flush with the success of a novel, sees one of Coe’s houses in a magazine and wants to hire Coe to build this house on an undeveloped hill in Bel Air. Coe convinces Altar he can do better than that; Altar gives him a big budget to do it. Douglas and Kovacs have great chemistry. Their characters are fun to watch and their back-and-forth about their work is authentic and helpful to each. Altar’s offhand social attitudes may put off viewers in 2020 but they were unremarkable at the time.

Coe met his wife Eve (Barbara Rush) on furlough during the war. The actors’ good chemistry here shows that Larry and Eve have a loving relationship in a comfortable home with two sons. Eve is a supportive housewife ambitious for her husband’s career as an elevator to status. Larry knows that she is disappointed that he left the firm, and that she also knows when the firm keeps after him to take prestigious, high-paying commissions, that he would prefer to do his own work, like the Altar house

Margaret Gault (Kim Novak) is one of the Coes’ Brentwood neighbors. Since Coe began to work from home he drives his school-age son to the bus stop. This is where he first sees Mrs. Gault, stunning in a plain Republican cloth coat as she brings her own son to the bus stop. Coe gets used to seeing Mrs. Gault at the bus stop. He crosses paths with her several times but makes no headway with small talk. At last one morning he gets her to ride with him to the Altar building site. They spend the morning taking measurements, at the end of which Coe tells Mrs. Gault he can see his building; perhaps in the same spirit, calling this beautiful but reserved Margaret “Maggie” is his parti for their affair.

A detail that lends authenticity to the story and Coe’s character is that the Altar building site is where we watch a house become part of the hill as this story develops. The house construction keeps pace with the affair. This was Ernie Kovacs’s home at 930 Chantilly Road in Bel Air, a beautifully refined structure with an almost Japanese sensibility that a later remodel rendered into a heavy post-modern Western pile.

See this movie on a large screen. It is shot in color in CinemaScope and many scenes unfold in long takes within the frame, seamed together with clean contrast cuts, such as from a housewife in one kitchen to a neighbor in a similar kitchen.

Margaret’s mother Mrs. Wagner (Virginia Bruce) adds a generational context and a plot point. An affair apparently ended her marriage with Margaret’s father and since strained her relationship with her daughter. Mrs. Wagner sees herself in her daughter: Margaret married Ken Gault (John Bryant), “the first nice boy that came along” and may repeat her history. Mrs. Wagner knows her daughter is not in love with Ken. He displays a fraternal fondness for his wife; he bristles awkwardly in private as she smolders for his attention.

The odd man out is the cynical, ironic moralist Felix Anders (Walter Matthau), a self-described “observer of the human scene”.

In the end, a plane leaves Casablanca with people on it headed for a new life. Prior to that, Larry, a romantic like Rick Blaine, must decide whether the “problems of three little people” amount to more than “a hill of beans” in life’s larger contexts. 

Strangers When We Meet 1960 US; Columbia Pictures (117 minutes) directed by Richard Quine; screenplay by Evan Hunter based on Hunter’s novel of the same title; cinematography by Charles Lang; editing by Charles Nelson; music by George Duning.