The Tough Guy Romantic Comedy

Five notable screen tough guys who've dipped their toes in rom-com world.

Rhinestone (1984)
Directed by Bob Clark

By 1984, Sylvester Stallone was one of the biggest movie stars around, known the world over as Rocky Balboa and John Rambo. So it’s a bit hard to understand just why he was so insistent about starring alongside Dolly Parton in the musical rom-com “Rhinestone.” What did he see in the role of taxicab driver-turned-country-western singer Nick Martinelli? Was Stallone so confident in his own charisma that he convinced himself he could turn any property into a hit? Was he higher than Stevie Nicks on the “Tusk” tour? Did Satan call in a marker?

Whatever the motivation, the resultant film is so hilariously putrid that even Stallone himself has taken to referring to it in interviews as “my contribution to birth control.” It’s certainly not his contribution to country music. In one notorious sequence, Sly wraps his frail vocal chords — maybe the only underdeveloped muscles on his entire body by the mid-1980s — around “Drinkenstein,” a song about getting soused and turning into a rampaging monster. Immediately following “Rhinestone,” Stallone retreated to more traditional roles like “Rambo: First Blood Part II,” where he returns to Vietnam and single-handedly destroys half the country with a bow and arrow. In this context, that seems like the cinematic equivalent of buying a new Corvette.

Love With the Proper Stranger (1963)
Directed by Robert Mulligan

Fresh off of the adventure operatics of “The Great Escape” (1963), Steve McQueen shifted gears with the dark romantic comedy “Love With The Proper Stranger.” He plays a musician more successful with ladies than with gigs, until Natalie Wood tracks him down for an unwelcome announcement. The plot takes a number of hairpin turns, twisting from nocturnal drama (confronting back-alley abortions) to knockabout farce (McQueen’s clumsy attempt to court Wood). Wood’s petulant performance keeps the film from flying off the rails, and her magnetic strength is what pulls McQueen closer into her button-nosed dominion. Her continual rejections enrage and mystify him, inflaming his jealousy towards her sometime boyfriend Tom Bosley and inspiring panicked stabs at attention. In the end, he finds himself desperately marching outside her Macy’s workplace, strumming a banjo and thrusting up a “Better wed than dead!” sign. Love drove him insane, and staring at Wood’s luminous face in this movie, it’s hard to blame him.

Breezy (1973)
Directed by Clint Eastwood

Lost in between the success of “Play Misty for Me” (1971) and “High Plains Drifter” (1973), “Breezy” (1973) is the forgotten feature in Eastwood’s directing career. A flop upon release, in retrospect it stands as a bold, completely charming departure from this erstwhile auteur of violent masculine angst (who chooses, aside from an uncredited cameo, to remain offscreen). The title captures the tone: a light May-December romance (with a back-beat of loneliness) that joins an aging lothario, William Holden, with the 18-year old hippie chick Kay Lenz.

Holden’s face was a craggy landscape at this point in his storied career, and he plays the curmudgeon with a haggard acidity. Picking her up as a hitchhiker, Holden endures a philosophical conversation (KL: “Do you think God is dead?”; WH: “I didn’t know he was sick.”) and afterward she keeps popping up at his door to beg for food. Their relationship grows slowly and combatively off these meet-cutes, building comedy and hints of tragedy out of their yawning social and age gap (a date broken up by his ex-wife is particularly queasy). An underrated gem, and one that you can watch online for free at Hulu.

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