Never Love a Stranger (Harold Robbins Productions, Caryn Productions, Allied Artists, 1958)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, September 8) my husband Charles and I watched a rather strange and offbeat movie on Blu-Ray, Never Love a Stranger, based on a 1948 novel by Harold Robbins (his first) but not filmed until a decade later. I got this as part of a three-disc box from Kino Lorber called Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XXIII along with the 1950 film Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye co-starring James Cagney and Barbara Payton (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2026/04/kiss-tomorrow-goodbye-william-cagney.html) and the 1950 film Rope of Sand, a Casablanca knock-off (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2026/04/rope-of-sand-wallis-hazen-productions.html) which, as I wrote in the above moviemagg blog post, needed Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and got Burt Lancaster and Corinne Calvet. None of these three movies is all that impressive as film noir (and judging from a quick scan of Kino Lorber’s other alleged film noir the other 22-plus boxes, few if any of the items within them qualify as all-out noir). Never Love a Stranger – which I must acknowledge I frequently get confused with Not As a Stranger, a 1955 medical melodrama starring Frank Sinatra and Robert Mitchum as aspiring doctors, produced and directed by Stanley Kramer (his directorial debut) and based on a novel by Morton Thompson, a writer with an even hackier reputation than Harold Robbins – is a gangster movie from the late 1950’s, when Hollywood was churning out films that recycled the clichés of the 1930’s gangster films.

It begins with Francis Kane (John Drew Barrymore, John Barrymore’s son and Drew Barrymore’s father) driving down a New York street in a late-model convertible, which he has a great deal of difficulty controlling because he’s been severely wounded in a gun battle. He loses control of the car and it crashes, with his body spilling out of it to indicate that he’s dead. Then we get the opening credits and a sepulchral-voiced narrator (Milo O’Shea) reading what we presume are bits of Harold Robbins’s non-deathless prose about the situation this so far unnamed character got himself into and why he's died such an ignominious death. Then, after the opening credits tell us at long last what the movie is called and who’s in it, it flashes back to 1912. Expectant mother Frances Kane (Vitina Marcus) shows up at the home of a midwife, Mrs. Cozzolina (Augusta Merighi) about to give birth, and the birth is attended not only by the midwife but by a doctor; a Roman Catholic priest, Brother Bernard (Douglas Rodgers); and another man whose function seemed mysterious to me. The midwife takes the suitcase from the mom-to-be and puts it on the top shelf of a closet, where it immediately falls out the back and is lost for the next 16 years (this will be important). With the mother offering no clue as to what she wants her newborn baby boy to be called, and also offering no clue as to who the father might be, the priest decides to give him the name “Francis Kane,” the masculine form of his mother’s name. Ironically Harold Robbins was born in 1916 and given the name “Francis Kane,” though unlike his fictional namesake, who’s raised in a Roman Catholic orphanage, the author was adopted by a New York Jewish couple, Charles Rubin and Frances Smith.

Anyway, the movie Francis Kane drifts into a life of crime when he hangs out at a pool hall that’s a front for a speakeasy (it’s 1928, during Prohibition). He’s there giving a shoeshine to gangster “Silk” Fennelli (Robert Bray) when he’s disrupted and his shoeblack is spilled over the floor. Fennelli gives him $5 to get more and asks him to come back; Fennelli’s associates are skeptical as to whether they’ll ever see him again. Meanwhile a police raid forces Fennelli and his fellow gangsters to flee the place, but Francis catches up to him later. Fennelli is running a protection racket and extorting money from the speakeasies as well as legitimate businesses, and he’s just collected a large amount of cash when there’s a drive-by shooting (which was so much grainier than the rest of the film I suspect it was a stock clip from the 1932 Scarface), and Fennelli gives Francis the wad of cash he had on him. Meanwhile Francis has hooked up with a Jewish family, the Cabells: dad is a politician, son Martin (a young Steve McQueen; when I saw his name in the cast list I assumed he was playing a nothing bit part, but he’s actually fourth-billed and his character runs throughout the film) is a good boy who’s cornered in the neighborhood by racist thugs who resent that he’s a Jew; and daughter Julie (Lita Milan) resents that she had to give up her singing career to go to work to maintain the family. Naturally Francis falls for Julie, and he also agrees to teach Martin how to box so he can defend himself against any further prejudicial attacks. Just then Brother Bernard discovers the suitcase Francis’s mom left at Mrs. Cozzolina’s lo those many years ago. He opens it and discovers a Bible printed in Hebrew and bound right-to-left in a white cover with a star of David. This proves that Francis is really Jewish, and therefore he can’t stay at the Catholic orphanage anymore – though, oddly, at least in the movie (maybe Robbins made more of this plot point in his book), nothing much happens except that Francis, determined not to be shunted off into a Jewish orphanage, hops a freight train and gets out of town. Unfortunately the Great Depression hits at this time and trashes any hope of Francis actually finding legitimate employment. He ends up homeless and ultimately is run over by a truck and ends up in a hospital, where the other principals find him and reunite with him.

Francis gets hired as Fennelli’s chauffeur, only to find that Julie Cabell (ya remember Julie Cabell?) has become Fennelli’s mistress in exchange for voice lessons and sponsorship in a career as a singer (where she sings two songs, “Never Love a Stranger” and “Oh Baby,” composed by the film’s musical director, Raymond Scott, with lyrics by Lawrence Elow and Dorothy Collins as Lita Milan’s voice double). Unfortunately the end of Prohibition also sparks a major gang war between Fennelli and his fellow ex-bootleggers who’ve taken up running casinos and off-track horse-racing betting as alternative sources of income. After two or three years of this, Francis hits on the idea of organizing the gangsters into a syndicate, and when they naturally ask him who’s going to run it for them, Francis announces that he will because he's the only one who isn’t running a racket himself. Relative peace and calm returns to New York City, though public pressure against Francis’s and his colleagues’ illegal activities lead the governor of New York and the mayor and attorney general of New York City to appoint a special prosecutor to bust Francis and put his syndicate out of business. You don’t need two guesses who the special prosecutor will be; it’s Francis’s old boyhood friend Martin Cabell. Cabell tries to get Francis to turn himself in, but instead Francis moves to New Jersey and runs the mob from there, thumbing his nose in the face of New York law. Alas, Fennelli and the other mobsters are starting to chafe under Francis’s control, especially when one of them, Moishe, announces he wants to cash out and retire before either the cops or his fellow crooks knock him off. Francis orders Moishe be paid his full share of the earnings, which leads the other gangsters and their hired out-of-town hit people to set a trap whereby Francis will lure Martin Cabell to a meeting and the gangsters will murder Martin and set up Francis to take the fall. Julie is present when the setup happens and the gangsters insist on killing her, too, though in the end both she and Martin escape while Francis, driving Martin’s car, tries to escape but is mortally wounded.

There’s an odd tag scene in which Martin and his sister Julie are together at the birth of Julie’s child by Francis, and they express hope that unlike Francis himself, his son will grow up to be a law-abiding person. The ending reminded me of Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night, a film noir made in 1948 (the same year Harold Robbins published Never Love a Stranger, though They Live by Night was based on a 1937 novel called Thieves Like Us by Edward Anhalt), only in Ray’s film the father of the baby is killed by police before the child is born and the implication is that he too will grow up to be a criminal just like his father did, since his grandfather was also a crook killed in a police shootout before dad was born. Never Love a Stranger is an odd movie, directed by Robert Stevens (who made just four other films as a director, among them Change of Mind, a 1969 anti-racist science-fiction film in which the brain of a terminally ill cancer patient is transplanted into a Black man; it’s noteworthy in that Duke Ellington wrote and recorded the film’s score) from a script written by Harold Robbins and Richard Day. John Drew Barrymore was as much of a scapegrace in real life as his character, an alcoholic like his dad and also a drug addict who got in trouble with both the Actors’ Equity Association and the Screen Actors’ Guild – though he managed to survive until age 72, a decade longer than his dad. It’s an O.K. gangster movie which might have been stronger if Barrymore and McQueen had switched roles. Then again maybe it wouldn’t have been; over the years McQueen famously became convinced that he was stronger as an actor and a screen personality if he became more taciturn and reacted silently to what the other characters were saying and doing. McQueen is about the only movie star in Hollywood history who asked that his scripts be rewritten to give him fewer lines of dialogue, and on one of his later films his director got so exasperated with him over that he took him aside and said, “Steve, you’ve got to say something!” Also there’s no clue as to why the film should be called Never Love a Stranger (perhaps Robbins made that more clear in his book), and despite his impressive family pedigree John Drew Barrymore comes off as just one more James Dean wanna-be trying to take advantage of the opening left by the original Dean’s death.