Party Girl

Of course we have all seen this type of story line a few times, especially if you enjoy the film 'noire of the 1940s and 1950s era. What sets this crime/film 'noire/romance apart from others is the first class performances of the four main characters. The gorgeous gams of professional dancer Cyd Charisse are on full display in her role as Vicki Gaye and she is the love interest of the smartest criminal defence attorney Thomas Farrell played to perfection by Robert Taylor who unfortunately died in the prime of his life and in his career as a first rate Hollywood star.

Thomas Farrel is the lead counsel for mob boss Rico Angelo played by Academy Award best actor nominee Lee J. Cobb who rules his crime empire and the streets below him by fear of death or serious injury to anyone who would even consider double crossing him. Now lawyer Thomas Farrell does have a close working relationship with the mob boss Rico Angelo who pays him top dollar for keeping him and his cronies out of jail even when they are up on murder charges. Such is the case with Louis Canetto played by John Ireland who is charged with murder but gets off due to the masterful defence strategy used by his lawyer, Thomas Farrel.

Louis Canetto has his eyes set on the pretty party girl Vicki Gaye but so does defence lead counsel Thomas Farrel. It does not take the gorgeous Cyd Charisse who plays Vicki Gaye long to assess that she will have a much more loving relationship with lawyer Thomas Farrel than she would with the mob underling Louis Canetto.

So you can see that this film 'noire has the typical seedy criminal element who require a smart lawyer to continuously defend them, and it has the party girl turned love interest of the brilliant lawyer who is used by the mob boss to get what he wants out of his top notch lawyer Thomas Farrell. Where I see this film excels and where other similar pictures of the era falter is with the high caliber acting of these four main characters such that the film has ended when the audience wants to see more.

I give the film a pretty good 7 out of 10 rating.

Quite possibly Nicholas Ray's most visually eloquent film, the poorly- named Party Girl focuses not on the Cyd Charisse titular character but her romantic interest, mob lawyer Tom Farrell, played with great intensity and dedication by Robert Taylor.

Charisse is even more luminous than usual thanks in part to the mesmerizing lighting and camera work utilized by Ray in two major dance numbers obviously included to showcase MGM's most talented dancer. However, Ray was also able to elicit a rather touching albeit somewhat unrealistic performance from Charisse in playing a lonely showgirl drawn to Taylor's disfigured lawyer trapped in the world of defending known criminals.

Such a story had been done before many different ways, yet under Ray's direction the film achieves a certain sense of nobility and appreciation. It is not flashy, but not boring either. It is, as much of Ray's work was at the time, workman-like and beautifully crafted. Compared to much of the other features released at the time, Ray's films stand out today as rising above the material he was given to work with.

This movie makes more sense if you watch the documentary MGM: When the Lion Roars, about the history of MGM. According to the documentary, 1936-1946 was MGM's Golden Era. However, after the war, tastes in film changed, but MGM refused to change with the times or the tastes of post-war America. By the 1950's MGM was a Lion in Winter. Thus this rather split personality film begins to make sense from the context of its manufacturer. It can't decide what kind of film it wants to be, going back and forth between the big musical spectacles that MGM was famous for since the dawn of sound, to hard-hitting gangster characters and antics in the Warner Brothers tradition, to social commentary on the plight of the disabled in modern times and a beauty and the beast romance. If you know the chaos into which MGM is plunged by 1958, this enables you just to sit back and enjoy the film, which does have a great deal to offer.

The movie is badly mislabeled, since it really is not that centered on party girls at all. Instead it is basically a prohibition era romance between a beautiful showgirl played by Cyd Charisse and a lame mob lawyer played by Robert Taylor. Already dumped by one glamor girl who just wanted his money but was repulsed by his misshaped body, Taylor's character is understandably reluctant to get involved again. However, soon the pair are in love and Taylor's character gains the confidence to want to stop being the mob's mouthpiece. However, leaving the mob is not such a quick and clean business, whether you are an attorney or just a muscle man.

Taylor gives a very good performance in this one, and Lee J. Cobb's performance as a mobster looks like it was the inspiration for Robert De Niro's portrayal of Al Capone in 1987's The Untouchables, in at least one scene anyways. This one is definitely worth your time if it comes your way.

''Party Girl'', Ray's final film for a major Hollywood studio(after this he worked with independent producers) is a highly baroque work. Screechingly mannerist in places, occasional head-first dives into camp but also remarkable instances of poetry and subtlety and a highly charged social portrait. It is a very discordant work which is to say that it deliberately skewers audiences expectations of a genre film by working as a genre film but stylized in a manner that the clichés and conventions look highly abstract, not unlike a film by Douglas Sirk.

''Party Girl'' is shot in CinemaScope and Metrocolor, is produced by Joe Pasternak who was in charge of the second-tier MGM unit. The Leonine studio had by the mid-50's devolved into an organization of penny-pinchers and according to Ray, the only reason this film got made was because it's backers wanted to get rid of it's two stars...Cyd Charisse and Robert Taylor so as to exhaust their run of contracted films as quickly as possible. This explains the fact that more than ''Johnny Guitar''(with it's superlative cast of actors), ''Party Girl'' is the closest Ray came to make a B-Film. The storyline is a standard-issue crime drama and it is by a safe distance the most generic of Ray's major films.

That it's still a major film is for me little doubt. Though lacking the strength of his early crime films and his 50's melodramas, ''Party Girl'' is still a deeply compelling film about the universality of compromises in society. The title ''Party Girl'' is essentially a slang for prostitute or for being under someone else's thumb. It refers to Cyd Charisse's character Vicki Gaye, a showgirl who works part-time as escort to various underworld types alongside other gals who work at the ''Rooster Folliers''(no joke). But it also includes mob lawyer Tommy Farrel(Robert Taylor) and applies to everyone else.

Ray's distaste for plot apparent in all his films is full in abundance here as the generic outline of this story of crooked lawyer turned straight through the power of love takes on several asides. Like the one-scene appearance of a fellow showgirl who's waiting for her man and whose depression, Vicki stifles as a result of habit and accord over the years. The scene where she walks into her roommate's bathroom and finds her swimming literally in a pool of her own blood in a bath-tub is one of Ray's most embedded images even if(in accord with then censorship) the image lasts only a few micro-seconds before a quick fade-away. Much of the secondary section of the film centers on Tommy's relationship with Rico Angelo(Lee J. Cobb in a towering performance) and there's very little plot driving their very powerful scenes. Tension arises from flaming egos by a mob underling played by John Ireland over Tommy's relationship with Vicki.

The film's sense of decor and colour is what we'd call now Fassbinderesque. It's pictorially fascinating and the colours are very eye-catching but the underlying design behind it is a sense of decadence of vulgarity. This reflects perhaps that the underlying subtext of this film is less about gangsters than about Hollywood. With Lee J. Cobb's mix of charisma(like Vito Corleone in ''The Godfather'') and crass vulgarity(like Joe Pesci in his films with Scorsese) stand-in for many studio heads of that period and the two musical interludes(numbers is the wrong word for it) by Cyd Charisse while visually striking is poorly choreographed and seems like a parody of the dying MGM Musicals.

''Party Girl'' is a reflection ultimately of what are the results when a great artist and a few good actors are working with conventional plots can achieve. It's a work that's of it's own kind. Not a gangster film entirely, mostly a Film Noir though in colours, visually creative but mostly functional. The decor of the film makes it's genre trappings apparent and obvious revealing and critiquing it's functions yet the scenes between Taylor and Charisse are very much played straight conveying genuine compassion between two characters who have long lost their innocence and are merely doing their best to survive and find a semblance of happiness, a happiness that's threatened not only by the mob but also by the cops who want to use them to catch the bad guys(which has much benefits for their own political careers).

What may put off most fans of Nicholas Ray is the graphic violence of the film which is quite unexpected and strong for a film of the 50's. Plenty of bloodletting is on display on this film...of course Ray would say "that's not blood...that's red."

Interesting movie. Very interesting, though the title is inexcuseably misleading. Nicholas Ray directs and, not surprisingly, makes novel use of shadows, bold colors and wild camera angles. There is a bravura montage of an explosion of mob violence which is sudden and startling. Ray, best known as the director of "Rebel Without a Cause", takes a smart, tough script and; unlike many crime movies which contain similar ingredients but fail to resonate, gives the movie a soul. There's something about its tone and feel, some simmering menace and creeping regret that reminds one of another mob movie which would be released 15 years later: "The Godfather". And as in that classic, the Lawyer/Mob Boss relationship is complex and fascinating.

While much of the credit deservedly goes to Ray's maverick methods and genius, the cast is also very good. Robert Taylor never developed the kind of easily identifiable screen persona of a Bogart or Jimmy Stewart, but he was a sturdy leading man who usually served the material and could be depended upon to anchor a film. He pours his heart into this part, his last as an MGM contract player. Cyd Charisse was never known as a great actress but she is capable in her role as a feisty Show Girl, and she gets a good opportunity to show off perhaps the most eye-popping, perfectly sculpted figure in the history of motion pictures. And of course, nobody was better at playing hot-tempered thugs than the great Lee J. Cobb.

Turner Classic Movies is such a goldmine. It's so satisfying to see movies, such as this one, that know how to introduce plot points and convincingly tie them up and bring things full circle. "Party Girl" may not be quite a great film, but it is very, very good.