The current turmoil over abortion rights arose after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade two years ago. But the problems created by unwanted pregnancies have been around for generations, since long before Roe v. Wade made legal abortions possible in the U.S. in 1973.
A Place in the Sun was a powerful 1951 Hollywood film highlighting the problem. Starring Montgomery Clift and Ellizabeth Taylor, the film featured Shelley Winters as a hapless young woman whose unwanted pregnancy led to disastrous consequences. Based on the Theodore Dreiser novel An American Tragedy, the film dramatized a real-life story dating back to 1906. I’ve watched this film many times, and although I felt sympathy for Shelley Winters’s pathetic character, I never related to her.
A much later Hollywood film openly dealt with the subject of abortion in 1963. Love With the Proper Stranger featured two Hollywood superstars during that era, Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen (both of whom coincidentally met untimely deaths in 1980/81). It became a huge box-office hit in 1963, and it’s worth revisiting today.
In the film, Natalie Wood (as “Angela”) and Steve McQueen (as “Rocky”) confront the abortion question head-on. Rocky is a jazz musician seeking a gig at a union hiring hall in NYC when Angela suddenly appears. Steve McQueen had just starred in The Great Escape and a bunch of popular Western films, but he reportedly wanted to play a different kind of character in a different kind of film. Natalie Wood’s career was thriving, and she probably relished playing a sharp young woman who boldly chooses to confront the one-night stand who’s caused her a serious problem—an unwanted pregnancy.
Angela’s life is constrained by her oppressive family. She’s “choking to death” in their small apartment, constantly vowing to escape. Now, unhappily pregnant, she tells Rocky, “All I want from you is a doctor.”
After some hesitation, Rocky tracks down the name of a doctor who charges $400 for an abortion, and he agrees to pay half. The two of them arrive at the location where they’ve been told to bring the money, but the lowlife they meet demands another $50. (Please note: Angela is wearing a dress and high-heeled shoes, an outfit that looks absurd when viewed today. This is what Hollywood moguls must have thought women wore to their illegal abortions in the 1960s.)
The couple has scraped up the original $400 fee with difficulty, so they resort to getting the extra $50 from Rocky’s family. They finally make their way to the doctor’s address, a run-down apartment where Angela shakily begins to undress. But the abortionist is a not an MD, just a rude woman with scary-looking things in a suitcase. Angela is shocked and begins to sob, fearful of what might happen to her. Rocky bursts in, and they escape together, Rocky bravely announcing “I’ll kill them before I let them touch you.”
Their budding romance has its ups and downs as they deal with Angela’s family and a prospective suitor her mother pushes on her. But Rocky finally realizes that he loves Angela, and he asks her to marry him. Thus we have a typical Hollywood “happy ending.” Except that this couple has shared a horrific run-in with the illegal abortion industry that existed in NYC in 1963.
Love With the Proper Stranger offered a cautionary tale for its audience, including a young woman like me. When I saw this movie, I was a naïve student hovering between college and law school. Although I was dating a variety of suitors, I wasn’t as sexually active as many other women my age. (I was what we called a “good girl”.) Still, I could easily see myself in Angela’s appalling situation, confronting an unwanted pregnancy sometime in the future. And it certainly struck me as unfair that it was the woman who had to deal with this situation while her partner could escape without any consequences.
Four years later, I graduated from law school with the goal of helping minorities and women achieve the justice often denied them in the U.S. at that time. So when I began work in a job that enabled me to challenge the constitutionality of the restrictive Illinois abortion statute, I seized the opportunity to effect change and, with my co-counsel, took on that challenge.
Did seeing the film, Love With the Proper Stranger, influence me in any way? Specifically, did it influence me to become a lawyer who challenged that restrictive law?
Maybe.
In retrospect, I think I was influenced by a great many things in our culture. Including Hollywood movies.
A much more recent movie similarly addresses the deplorable absence of abortion rights in 1963: The 2021 French film, Happening, based on the 2000 novel with the same title by the 2022 Nobel Prize-winner in literature, Annie Ernaux. Ernaux’s novel, and the film adapted from it, dramatize the real-life experiences she endured (coincidentally in 1963) when, as a promising young college student, she was faced with an unwanted pregnancy. Both the film and the book depict her repeated attempts to secure a safe abortion, thwarted by the harsh anti-abortion law governing French women at that time.
Happening is a far more sophisticated version of this story than the 1963 U.S. version. It garnered outstanding reviews by prominent film critics worldwide. Anyone viewing it lives through exactly what women at every level in French society confronted when they tried to live a meaningful life free from the cruel and antiquated views of abortion by those in leadership positions in the French government.
Like the story in Love With the Proper Stranger, it’s a story as vivid to us today as it was to those of us who fought against the harsh laws depriving women of their reproductive freedom in the past. In 2024, we must vow to re-fight those fights whenever and wherever our reproductive rights are denied.
susanjustwrites
Susan Just Writes 