The Party's Over

The party may have been over for the beatniks who form the centerpiece of this strange but compelling film, but for the rest of London it was just beginning. Unusually for a British production of this vintage (1963) it doesn't fit easily in any genre. An American girl who has been hanging around with the 'beats' goes missing amid lurid rumours of rape and even necrophilia. The atmosphere is one of existential angst laced and a fin de siecle fatalism, all conveyed by way of some studiously framed b&w photography. Aside from some clunky dialogue and plumy accents this could easily be French, perhaps because the story is by Marc Behm an American expat based in France who wrote Eye of the Beholder, later transposed by Claude Miller into the excellent thriller Mortelle Radonnee starring Isabelle Adjani.

Oliver Reed plays the leader of the 'beats' in such manner that you feel the void each time he's off-screen, he really is terrific and makes the rest of the cast look like the b-movie stalwarts they were. Particularly dreadful is Mike Pratt who plays Geronimo, an artist/drummer. The party scenes with all the beats lounging around or trying to twist to modern jazz are great,as is the jazz itself with John Barry and Annie Ross contributing.

The opening bars of the jazz-style theme alerts us to the likely seedy nature of this gritty tale of a young woman who arrives from a wealthy upbringing in the USA in 1960s London. She falls in with a rather Bohemian band of reprobates known as the "Pack", a group of young people who live a pretty disparate existence - sex, drugs, rock and roll - you know the story - and Oliver Reed is quite effective as their leader "Moise". Tragedy ensues, though, and the group must face up to some of their excesses with varying degrees of honesty and success. It's trying to be visceral, this film - it swipes at the tribal, almost feral nature of relationships amongst the group who have a moral compass all of their own. Although Guy Hamilton spares us the worst of the physical manifestations of their behaviour, our imagination is quite capable of plugging the gaps. The censors had a whale of a time with this - and even now, it isn't hard to see why - some of the taboos it addresses would still be treated gingerly even today - 55 years later. The photography does much to enhance the earthiness of the production, close ups proving particularly effective alongside the score. Reed really steals the film, too - with the young Louise Sorel "Melina" - the aforementioned daughter; and Katherine Woodville "Nina" - maybe the only one of them with any semblance of what we might call decency - adding (gunpowder) to the mix too. It's nowhere near as potent as it was, but as an example of groundbreaking cinema it has to be worth a watch.

"The Party's Over" is nothing special. What makes it interesting is knowing that it ran afoul of the British censors for depicting things that were back then considered "inappropriate".

Oliver Reed plays the leader of a group of young beatniks in London. They're the sort of folks who live only for thrills, without a care in the world. Things get particularly unpleasant when a young woman hooks up with them.

I couldn't tell if the movie was trying to take a position on the direction that the UK's younger generation was taking. With the youth starting to move away from the stodgy social order that defined England for much of the 20th century, Swinging London was becoming the face of the country. This movie casts a more cynical face on that.

Anyway, it's an OK, not great movie. Guy Hamilton would later direct four James Bond movies. Incidentally, "Dr. No" (not a Hamilton movie) got released the same day as the Beatles' "Love Me Do", sixty years ago this month. Good times.

This dark and disturbing drama of the '60's is notable for two reasons.The first is the very taboo nature of the storyline.Hardly surprising that it had problems with the British Board of Censors.The second is Oliver Reed's performance has the leader of a group of disillusioned young people,none of whom seemingly have any particular aim in life.These people do not seem to show any emotion or compassionate,even toward each other,something which is very evident in their attitudes towards the deaths of two of their number. I have read somewhere of this film being described as "Oliver Reed meets Necrophia".Watch this film,if you are a fan of Oliver Reed and if you can obtain it,but be prepared to feel depressed afterward.

THE PARTY'S OVER is an interesting time capsule piece that brings to life Beatnik culture in the mid 1960s. Given that nobody knows who the Beatniks were these days it's invariably a dated production, once controversial but now very tame in terms of execution and the old-fashioned black and white photography. The recently deceased Bond director Guy Hamilton had his name taken off the credits due to dissatisfaction with the film's censorship.

The film depicts a social group in which hedonism and ruthlessness are the order of the day. The idea of a gang of youths going around causing havoc without giving a thought for the consequences of their actions is an interesting one which has been explored many times in the cinema, perhaps to the extreme in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.

Added to this is a main mystery storyline in which a youthful investigator comes over from America to search for a missing girl. The actor playing him is Clifford David, later to essay the role of Beethoven in BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE. What happened to the girl forms the crux of the storyline, and eventually the mystery is revealed through some flashbacks which were once controversial, although they feel very tame and ordinary by modern standards; worse happens on an evening soap these days. Still, THE PARTY'S OVER is worth a watch, even if just to see Oliver Reed's surprisingly sensitive turn as the gang leader. His role is reminiscent of his one in THE DAMNED, but with greater nuance; he truly was an underrated actor.