Never Love a Stranger ** (1958, John Drew Barrymore, Steve McQueen, Robert Bray, Lita Milan, R G Armstrong) – Classic Movie Review 13,531

‘RAW and VIOLENT’ The 1958 black and white crime thriller film Never Love a Stranger is based on the 1948 bestseller by Harold Robbins, and stars John Drew Barrymore, Lita Milan, Robert Bray, and Steve McQueen in his first credited feature film.

‘RAW and VIOLENT as the book that sold 3,000,000 SIZZLING copies!’

Director Robert Stevens’s 1958 black and white crime thriller film Never Love a Stranger is based on the 1948 best seller novel by Harold Robbins, and stars John Drew Barrymore, Lita Milan, Robert Bray, Steve McQueen, and R G Armstrong. The book sold 3,000,000 copies! Wow, that is a best seller! It is the first credited feature film of Steve McQueen, billed fourth.

Harold Robbins’s gangster novel becomes a mostly uninvolving film in which a young man called Frankie Kane (John Drew Barrymore) is thwarted in his life of crime by his boyhood buddy, a Jewish law student named Martin Cabell (Steve McQueen). Frankie becomes romantically involved with the Cabell family’s maid Julie (Lita Milan).

Frankie is an orphan brought up in a Catholic orphanage, but at 16 learns he is Jewish and runs away instead of being moved to a Jewish home.

Frankie then goes bad, takes a life of crime and joins a crime syndicate. But he later reconnects with Julie, and joins Martin, who is now a crusading district attorney, in trying to put an end the syndicate.

Never Love a Stranger is a cheap-looking production that is very flat and dully acted when McQueen is off the screen. Barrymore is none too convincing as the misunderstood Jewish kid who goes from Catholic orphanage to crime syndicate to redemption. The novelettish. mechanically plotted, manipulative script harms it badly, though Lee Garmes’s classy black and white cinematography gives it a lift.

The cast are John Drew Barrymore, Steve McQueen, Robert Bray, Lita Milan, R G Armstrong, Salem Ludwig, Peg Murray, Douglas Rodgers, Felice Orlandi, Augusta Merighi, Abe Simon, Dolores Vittna, and Walter Burke.

Never Love a Stranger is directed by Robert Stevens, runs 92 minutes, is released by Allied Artists, is written by Harold Robbins and Richard Day, is shot in black and white by Lee Garmes, is produced by Harold Robbins, Richard Day and Peter Gettlinger, and is scored by Raymond Scott.

Release date: June 22, 1958.

Steve McQueen went on to make the 1964 film Love with the Proper Stranger

© Derek Winnert 2025 – Classic Movie Review 13,531

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