A very common trope in movies about romances is the way in which the two characters can have totally different personality types, with one being a free spirit and the other fairly strait-laced. Another movie of this type that I saw recently is Ginger in the Morning.
Sissy Spacek plays the free-spirited hippie-ish young woman, named Ginger; as the movie opens we see her hitch-hiking through New Mexico trying to get to Colorado Springs where she has a boyfriend working at the Air Force Academy. Cut to Albuquerque, where an airplane is landing. Getting off at the airport are Joe (Monte Markham) and Fred (David Doyle who gets a surprisingly high credit considering he's only in this one scene before the opening credits even show up). It's intimated that Joe has recently gotten a divorce and, with New Year's coming up, Fred is suggesting that Joe ought to be looking for a woman to spend the holiday with. Get back into the dating scene, although Fred is trying to present himself as the sort of man who considers himself God's gift to women.
Now, as you might guess, Joe comes across Ginger out on the road, and decides to pick her up. However, he engages in a series of lies about his real situation, saying he's driving up to Denver for business and similar things before saying he's got a friend who would happily him borrow the friend's house for the holiday. This is, of course, Joe's own house, where he spends time being an amateur artist while not working at whatever executive type job he has out in the real world. The two talk and seem to be OK with each other's company, and spend the night together although it's not made clear how far they go.
Things go wrong the following morning. Charlie (Mark Miller) served with Joe in Korea, before going back to ranching in Texas and starting a family of his own, although, like Joe, Charlie's marriage ended in divorce. In Charlie's case, however, it's because of his drinking, which causes all sorts of obvious problems. Among the problems is showing up unannounced at his old buddy's house to celebrate the new year, which irritates Ginger for obvious reasons. Now here, I was frankly hoping that the plot twist would be that Joe and Charlie were both gay as it certainly would have made for an intriguing movie. Instead, the plot twist is that Charlie's ex Sugar (Susan Oliver) calls up from the airport in Albuquerque saying tht she's got a layover. Since Charlie has screwed up Joe's assignation with Ginger, Joe decides he's going to get revenge on Charlie by setting him up with Sugar, only without telling him that it's Ginger he's going to pick up from the airport.
Things get complicated from here, although as I was watching the movie I kept expecting there to be the typical Hollywood happy ending. That ending does more or less occur, but I wonder how long all of the four principals would continue to be happy after the closing credits. Ginger in the Morning is an interesting enough premise, and clearly the sort of movie that couldn't have been under the Production Code. However, it also felt to me like the sort of film that hasn't dated all that well, in part because Ginger and Joe come across more like character types than fully fleshed-out human beings. The other thing that made Ginger in the Morning a bit difficult to love is that Charlie is a rather obnoxious character, from the time he shows up to when he starts getting way too drunk for his own good.
If you want to see a look at the cultural values of the first half of the 1970s, along with some nice location shooting in New Mexico, you could do a lot worse than Ginger in the Morning. But at the same time, there's a reason this is the sort of movie I had never heard of before it ran on TCM.
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