Strangers When We Meet | 
 enlarge | Director: Richard Quine
Actors: Kirk Douglas, Kim Novak, Ernie Kovacs, Barbara Rush, Walter Matthau
Studio: Sony Pictures
Category: DVD
List Price: $14.94
Buy New: $7.58
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Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 14348
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dvd-video, Subtitled, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Original Language), Japanese (Subtitled)
Rating: Unrated
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 117
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: COLD05038D
ISBN: 1404956069
UPC: 043396050389
EAN: 9781404956063
ASIN: B00070HK3I
Theatrical Release Date: 1960
Release Date: February 22, 2005
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Product Description
Architect larry coe has a wife and family but becomes embroiled in an affair with beautiful maggie gault a neighbor with her own family. The two lovers are forced to face the choice between love and loyalty. Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 06/27/2006 Starring: Kirk Douglas Ernie Kovacs Run time: 117 minutes Rating: Nr
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 Dancing about architecture November 14, 2008
A soap opera, sure, but one that's perfectly extravagant and surprisingly grown up, with unexpected moments of surprise and tension -- "Strangers," it's worth noting, has the best, most nerve-wracking unanswered phone call this side of "Once Upon a Time in America," and that's by no means faint praise.
Kirk Douglas plays a driven, artistically-inclined, vaguely-Zen-without-saying-Zen architect who builds high-dollar homes around Los Angeles. He's contentedly married but you couldn't call it "happily" -- to turn the old phrase, "his wife just doesn't understand him." Seriously.
Kim Novak is a troubled neighbor Douglas' character meets, befriends and then falls into an affair with. No way around it -- she's beautiful but she is seriously damaged goods and while an expensive big studio film from 1960 can't lay out everything we'd like to know about her past, it's still surprisingly frank: Her husband seems to have gone cold toward her following a rape she may or may not have allowed to happen.
We follow the couple through their rendezvous, awkward meetings and changes of favor, and the movie really takes its time establishing their environment and telling their story. It should be boring but it isn't. Part of that is due to the overall backdrop -- with its moneyed flavors, stitch-perfect clothes, painstakingly appointed sets and barely covered subtext, "Strangers" feels right in line with Douglas Sirk from the same period. But director Richard Quine and screenwriter Evan Hunter eschew Sirk's overt melodrama and lace the story with some unexpected maturity.
Novak, her blonde hair tinted vaguely violet, plays the whole movie on edge, phrasing her lines with tense whispers that shouldn't work but mostly kind of do.
Walter Matthau is also good as a sleepy-eyed suburban shark who makes big trouble for nice people, and the character could've supplied the basis for a fascinating film all on his own. As he and his son stroll the neighborhood, Matthau spies a beautiful housewife and says to his boy, who is about ten years old, "Love 'em all." Funny for a second, but hearing the leer in that friendly, familiar voice made my skin crawl.
Ernie Kovacs is also on-hand as one of Douglas' clients, a best-selling author. Kovacs doesn't appear to have a literary bone in his body (jet pilot, clothing magnate, casino owner and lottery winner all would've been more suitable-seeming careers for this character) but he sells their friendship far better than he sells the character. Plus, it's Ernie Kovacs, which is cool period casting you can't argue with.
I'm still working out the ending -- maybe it's a cop-out, but it's also devastating. Throughout the film, Douglas and Novak are constantly putting their fling on hold, then rushing back to each other, apologizing and basically asking to never fight again. Onscreen, it seems wildly indecisive and chain-yanking, but it also carries truth. That's how passion frequently operates. So at the end (SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT) when Douglas tells Novak he's going off to Hawaii to "build a city" and he's taking his wife and kids instead of her ... we have to wonder if that's really his final answer. Or an answer dictated by the studio. On top of which, hours earlier Douglas' wife banished him from her life with blunt economy, only to return almost immediately and successfully take it all back.
These questions and concerns, however, pale in harsh light of the final shot in which Novak, freshly dumped and taking it well, almost immediately encounters another smiling man (the same way she met Douglas, the same way she met the man who raped her) and drives away, crying, screwed again. It looks like a gimmick ending, it feels like a gimmick ending, but as it extends to show us her long drive away from something that really should've work out, it asks a particularly bleak question: What the hell is she going to do now?
Kirk Douglas like you've never seen him! July 8, 2008
Wow! this movie was wonderful. Set in 1960 and brought back wonderful memories of the way we dressed, the houses, the cocktail parties at home as I watched my parents entertain. Kirk Douglas was fit (Spartacus was being filmed at this time) so he was in great shape, very handsome. The affair had a surprise ending but the setting in Hollywood? all I could think of was that era and what was going on at the time. Marilyn Monroe, the Kennedy family and Elvis. Interesting part was the Hollywood writer having breakfast with Kirk Douglas and eating eggs and bacon with a cigarette at the same time...can't believe they really did that back then. Great movie, watched it again and again.
 Superior, Engrossing Douglas/Novak Soap Opera May 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Strangers When We Meet is one of those glossy, well-made soap operas that were very popular from the mid-1950s to early 1960s. And this is one of the better ones of the genre.
Kirk Douglas plays an architect who works primarily from home. He's married to Barbara Rush and has two sons. He meets and developes an affair with neighbor Kim Novak, also married with a son. Douglas and Novaak both feel guilty, but also feel powerless in the face of their attraction to each other. As time goes on, their secret bubbles closer and closer to the surface. Smarmy neighbor Walter Matthau (who also starred with Douglas in The Indian Fighter and Only The Brave) gives Douglas pointers on how to cheat, and even tries to entice Rush into a tryst. Further complicating things is an offer Douglas is weighing to move to Hawaii for five years to help develop a city. Does he leave to make a fresh start with his wife (who is beginning to suspect what's going on), or does he stay and juggle his marriage and affair?
The film is entertaining and well-acted. Ernie Kovacs plays a pivotal role as a writer for whom Douglas is building a house - a single, amoral man who is a success in career, but envies the wife and kids that Douglas has. Strangers When We Meet is a fine film that might end too neatly for some, but still manages to take a practical look at a topic that will always be with us.
 Adultery, Architecture and a Bit of Misogyny Dominate This Glossy Melodrama May 5, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This glossy 1960 melodrama was part of a wave of elegantly mounted Eisenhower-era films that dealt with seemingly normal people caught in situations in which they violate socially acceptable behavior but of course, not without a lot of grief, much of it self-inflicted. The acknowledged master of the genre was German-born filmmaker Douglas Sirk (All That Heaven Allows, Imitation of Life), but this especially soapish entry is definitely cut from the same cloth. Directed by journeyman Richard Quine (Paris When It Sizzles), it doesn't have the Baroque-level sensibilities to make this quite the wallow that Sirk's films have become over the years. Part of the reason is that the story is told mostly from a decidedly male perspective, which appears to run counter to the viewing audience one would expect for this film. It also feels overlong at 117 minutes.
Written by Evan Hunter (The Birds) based on his own novel, the plot concerns successful architect Larry Coe frustrated by his inability to live out his Frank Lloyd Wright-level aspirations while married to Eve, a sharp woman whose innate pragmatism encourages him to take on unappealing commercial projects. At the local supermarket, he meets Maggie Gault, beautiful but also married, and sparks are inevitable. She helps him get a commission to build a mid-century stunner of a cliff-side house for commercial novelist Roger Altar. The out-of-the-box design and construction of the house appears to parallel the illicit affair that develops between Larry and Maggie. What's most interesting about the story is not so much the adultery but the motivations behind the affair. Larry is not running away from a shrewish wife but rather looking for a kindred spirit who understands his artistic aspirations, while Maggie is married to an indifferent, probably impotent husband and trying to escape the stigma of "the other woman" already lived out by her mother. Nonetheless, what really dates the film is the underlying misogyny toward both Maggie and Eve as both appear victimized by how men define them.
Quine gathered an intriguing cast here. Just before taking on Kubrick's Spartacus, Kirk Douglas can't help but look heroic with his clenched jaw and chiseled features, but he is also surprisingly reserved and life-sized as a suburban father who waits with his children at the bus stop. Still fresh from Hitchcock's Vertigo, Kim Novak uses her glamorous allure and hesitant manner to solid effect here. Truth be told, despite the attractiveness of the leads, the sideline performances are comparatively more interesting - Barbara Rush shifting mercurially from sensible to distraught as Eve; TV comedian Ernie Kovacs likeably vulnerable in a rare dramatic role as Altar; and best of all, a young Walter Matthau as caddish neighbor Felix whose prurient interests become fully exposed when he discovers the affair. There is a particularly unnerving scene between him and Rush that makes you wish Quine took even more chances with the trite story. The movie even comes with a syrupy, overblown theme song with a full orchestra and chorus. Unfortunately, the 2005 DVD offers no extras except previews for three other films. I would have liked to have seen a featurette on the modern Japanese-style house Larry designed.
Finding the restaurant? May 4, 2008
There is a restaurant in the first part of the movie where Maggie and Larry meet for the first time. It is right on the ocean, you can see the waves through the window. My husband and I have been there and can't think of the name of the restaurant. Anyone out there know?
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