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.

Apparently controversial in 1963 when it was made (I don't remember it), The Party's Over is evocative of so many films i saw around that time in the cinema when I was seventeen. Guy Hamilton the director removed his name from it and moved on to making James Bond films. It's still a curiosity though to anyone like myself who likes to wallow in nostalgia for b/w movies, full screen and suffused with a jazz soundtrack and familiar faces from that pre Beatles era. Louise Sorel is the daughter of an American businessman and is now slumming it with some beatniks in London. Her father, played by Eddie Albert (giving the most professional performance) sends Clifford David over here to rescue her. He is her fiance and works for her father and he comes over to where he thinks she will be living but is unable to find her. The truth is she's avoiding him. Oliver Reed and others have designs on the young lady as well and they all meet in a den where booze flows freely and cigarette smoke clouds the air. Whether there were any drugs available there, I couldn't see but they may have been using more than just booze from the state of some of them. After the party they walk in a gang, zombie like, across one of the bridges in London and Oliver Reed (way over the top) flicks his cigarette butt at the watchful copper on the beat. He wouldn't get away with that today. The viewer gas the impression that these are quite well off middle to upper class young people as they seem to have plenty of money for drink and lazing around. This inevitably leads to tragic circumstances, given the amount of booze flowing and the rather banal script needing something dark to keep our interest. The cast is let down by a weak lead in Clifford David, an actor I've never heard of before. He takes a liking to the beautiful Catherine Woodville and she to him. She gives one of the best performances in the film but they lack chemistry I thought. Oliver is way over the top with his acting but he was on the verge of breaking through in a big way as I well remember and I went to most of his subsequent pictures in the sixties. Ann Lynn plays another of his clingy girl friends and is quite good also. I kept thinking how sad it is now that these young actors on the up, have now mostly left us. Mike Pratt, famous on TV was also a songwriter and here plays a beatnik. He died young at 45 from lung cancer but he wrote a lot of songs with Lionel Bart for Tommy Steele, including the children's favourite, Little White Bull sung by Tommy. As I say, this I found a curiosity, having missed it at the time and I couldn't resist a nostalgic look, although it's not very good.

Quite splendid London based film containing a towering performance from Oliver Reed amidst his fellow 'beatniks'. Interesting time capsule affair coming as it does as The Beatles break and before the so called 'swinging London'. Dream of an opening with the cast lazily/drunkenly and seemingly aimlessly walking across Albert Bridge in the early morning. Like the film generally, a beautifully shot sequence that clearly references European cinema despite the subsequent American references and cast inclusions. Much troubled history with heavily cut version being released two years after completion and only now available uncut on DVD. Surprisingly frank portrayal of sex and rock 'n' roll without the drugs and even the rock 'n' roll being replaced by jazz. Evocative, illuminating, unnerving and enjoyable with much London location exteriors.

Executive Producer Peter O'Toole and Jack Hawkins along with director Guy Hamilton took their names off this controversial British Beatnik flick where an American girl, missing from her New York tycoon father and businessman fiance, is supposedly raped/screwed after death: so for them it wasn't controversial enough...

Yet no actual necrophilia occurs (unless you count a quick posthumous kiss), even in the restored cut when -- a day before THE PARTY'S OVER -- Oliver Reed and his wayward cohorts play cat-and-mouse with Clifford David as the rich chick's arranged fiance, Carson...

Who's flown to England to not only get his girl back, but to know her, period, while she (Louise Sorel) is content with the breezy freedom among the eclectic crew of brooding Brits, either drinking and smoking while digging hot jazz when not coming down in the usual melancholy, philosophizing manner...

But it's not all emotional highs and lows since in its foundation, this is a Noirish, non-linear crime/mystery sporadically told through flashbacks provoked by the American's initially basic quest...

And he eventually becomes involved in a flirtatious, hang-around romance with the prettiest, wisest, seemingly most helpful English girls in Katherine Woodville's Nina, who, donning a slick black bowling hat and matching black cane, is lovestruck despite the secret she and the others are holding back...

As the most shocking and refreshing aspect -- much different than other counter-culture themed films -- is that the suit-and-tie fiance (a dapper-handsome hybrid of Robert Mitchum, Alan Badel, Cornel Wilde and Liam Neeson) is not the usual cliché idiotic conservative-square to make the progressive cool kids seem that much cooler...

So Clifford Davis's buried lead feels more like an even-keeled, experienced gumshoe, questioning (in vain) a goading, moody Oliver Reed, the passive-aggressive leader of the eclectic gang...

Each member foreshadowing the future punk rock movement of total individuality despite a sort of zombie-like/like-minded camaraderie (including Reed's big bald German sidekick; his cheated-on blues-crooning moll; a suicidal college student; and a gay messenger boy)...

But it's a shame these spontaneous, otherwise freewheeling nomadic scoundrels are so bogged-down by the previous night's crime (actually more of an unreported tragic accident)...

A burden that hinders their each and every step as, compared to the potentially awesome opening credits where the group coolly wanders across a bridge at a murky dawn, they could have been far more character-driven than guilt-ridden in what ultimately winds up a pre-Goth/Gothic romance about existential life (and love) after death.

"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.