Party Girl

This lurid pre-coder is about the use of "party girls" in big business. The idea is that business men are wined and dined at wild parties where there are available girls.

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. stars as a college boy who attends a party and is picked up by evil Leeda (Judith Barrie). Next morning she pretends she has been "wronged" and what's he gonna do about it? The sap marries her only to discover that she wants a business deal for her real boy friend in order to Fairbanks to divorce her. What a tramp! His dad's secretary (Jeanette Loff, who sings a couple songs), a reformed "party girl," is heartbroken and so returns to the party circuit only to get caught in a police raid.

This is a pretty racy film even for 1930. There's once scene where the girls fill a fountain with perfume and then the guys grab Marie Prevost (who does NOT get billing in this film for some reason), strip here and bathe her in the fountain while everyone watches.

The acting is just awful, with Fairbanks and Barrie turning in hideous performances, but the film is so suggestive and trampy, it's impossible not to watch.

John St. Polis the father, Almeda Fowler (don't call me madam!) is the madam, Louise Carver is the masseuse, and Lucien Prival is Newcast.

On the plus side, the music is quite good, and there that freight elevator that keeps delivering cars into the party living room!

In those days when Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was playing any kind of role other than costume swashbucklers, the better to establish his own identity separate from his father, Party Girl was a typical role for him. In Party Girl he plays a rich young playboy during that era of wonderful nonsense who gets himself tricked into a marriage to a gold digging flapper played by Judith Barrie. If Party Girl did anyone's career any good it should have been Barrie.

Almeeda Fowler plays the procurer for her escort service of which Barrie is part. Various businesses use her girls for 'entertainment' and the girls hope to land a rich husband one way or another.

Party Girl is one primitive talkie and it also bares no resemblance to Party Girl made a quarter of a century later with Robert Taylor and Cyd Charisse. Fairbanks is pretty insipid and that doesn't wear well on him.

Lots of pre-Code double entendre in Party Girl. But overall it hasn't worn well over the decades.

This tight little programmer (clocking in at just over 1 hour) is a real curio, Pre-Code of course. The film is designed to 'expose' the sordid underbelly of escort services who are only too happy to entertain men in high places(quite literally in this flick) for a fee. Like most movies of this genre, we are treated to a written prologue attesting to the scourge of the subject matter and how these sordid goings-on could be happening in our own town. This frequent framing device at the time would justify the seedy plot, in this case depicting between men of prestige and prosperity with call girls.

Marie Prevost is hot to trot in a secondary role as one of the 'ladies in waiting.' Miss Prevost did make the transition to sound almost seamlessly as an appealing blend between Betty Boop and Clara Bow. Yet, her fluctuating weight would unfortunately relegate her casting to this caliber of portrayals for the rest of her career.

Judith Barrie is the lead 'party girl' here who leads Douglas Fairbanks Jr. character, scion to millions of dollars, down that reckless road to potential ruin. Miss Barrie handles her role with zest and a very contemporary feel. It's a shame she would abandon Hollywood (or vice versa) in two years.

Then there's Doug Fairbanks Jr. who always adds a note of prestige to any frame he appears in. On the threshold of stardom ('LITTLE CAESAR' would be beckoning soon) the swashbuckler's son is treating this role of a young bon vivant who is caught up in Miss Barrie's web of deceit and degradation like a walk in the park. Well, this is a Personality Pictures production, after all. This would be equivalent to summer stock for an A list actor waiting for that phone call from his agent with that really plum role at a 'major' studio.

Of course, there is an obvious moral to our story which is hastened after an on screen tragedy which is quite jolting.

Yet, when the lights come back on, it's still hard to forget those vehicles, packed with eager customers, transported by elevator directly to the 'party girls' living room, the ultimate drive-in escort service.

If you want to study good acting, this film is essential for, well, the flip side of the acting craft. The most basic line readings are spectacularly awful. My personal favorite: a woman, facing two policemen with overbearing warnings, saying, "so - long pause - what?" To be fair, though, the script, just the basic dialogue, is horrible and the plot is just the bare bones material for an audience to get a peek at a lurid world of 'party girls' and Prohibition-era 'gin parties.' The double-meanings are just a step more lurid than the thinly-veiled plots of other "A" pictures. While prostitution is the main theme, the look into how the rich flaunt the alcohol ban is sure to have titillated an audience of the era. The 'perfume' bath given to one of the girls is strongly suggested to be gin. And one cop notes before questioning a girl that the guilty go for a bottle before being interrogated. The class depictions in a film shot at the onset of the Depression also are stark. The rich drink and carouse with poor girls on the margins of society who, as the opening title says, want only to earn a living in a "decent" way. The message to women is clear enough: the workplace is no place for decent gals.

There's nothing really shocking or even interesting about this precode, not even for 1930. It's basically about a ring of professional "party girls" that work for one particular madam and go around entertaining bored businessmen. Doug Fairbanks Jr. Is the partying son of the head of a manufacturing concern who crashes one of these parties one night and winds up with two souvenirs he could have done without - a huge hangover and a party girl wife. In the meantime, he's in love with his father's secretary who is a former party girl herself.

What is really notable here is the extremely bad acting. I've seen Doug Fairbanks Jr. In several of his early roles, and even if the films weren't that great, Doug's acting was OK. Here he really hams it up, along with the rest of the cast. I can only chalk it up to bad directing by Victor Halperin who made a number of unmemorable B pictures in the 30's, one of the exceptions to that being 1932's excellent "White Zombie".

The one strange thing that keeps happening in this film that I've never seen before is that everyone seems to think it's OK to drive your car into the service elevator of tall buildings and emerge on the floor of your choice. Fairbanks and his friends do it when they are crashing the party, and the police do the same thing at the end.

My verdict would be to pass on this film, even if you're a precode fan. It's neither cheesy nor entertaining enough to be worth your time.