Party Girl reminds us that director Nicholas Ray wasn’t just a master of noir. Alongside the stark monochrome of great dramas like In a Lonely Place and They Live by Night, there’s this insanely lush, ridiculously colourful offering, often bracketed with Ray’s other colour movies of the era – Johnny Guitar or Rebel without a Cause, for instance – but quite apart from them in tone.
It’s still very noirish, a gangster movie in colour, really, with Cyd Charisse the titular star but the movie very much focused on the character Robert Taylor plays, Tommy Farrell.
They’re both not-quite people: she’s a fan dancer (which really means stripper at the very least) at a club owned by a sentimental, unstable and often drunk gangster called Rico Angelo. Vicki is unhappy with the way her life is going and would really like to fulfil her childhood dreams and be a proper dancer. Farrell is Angelo’s crooked lawyer, with a gimpy leg, a semi-dormant set of ethics and a mouth so eloquent he can convince juries to set obviously guilty men free.
The arc of the film is of her finding him and then, thanks to Farrell’s interventions with Angelo, becoming a legitimate dancer. And him finding his moral compass, a turn of events that puts both of them in danger.
It may be called Party Girl but that’s because the film is sold on Charisse’s physical assets (mostly), her dancing ability (to a lesser extent) and on her playing of Vicki (least of all). In reality it’s all about Farrell’s flirtation with morality – is he going to find his soul and shop the guy he works for, turning state’s evidence?
All that – Farrell’s dithering, essentially – takes up the film’s last third, which is a trudge. The first two thirds are where the fun lies, watching the sex bomb and the courtly gent who walks with a stick circling each other warily. And then finally yielding to impulses that might destroy them.
Ray may be the director but he’s not entirely calling the shots. He’d signed on to make the film for various reasons, chief among them the fact that it was a studio movie, which offered security. But also because he believed he could bring some of the 1930s grit of Prohibition-era Chicago to the screen – it was where and when he’d grown up, after all.
By the time he started shooting, the film had morphed into something else, thanks not least to the musical numbers, inserted to make the most of Charisse’s talents – she was the last female contract player on MGM’s books (Robert Taylor was the last male) and by the studio’s decision to ignore the 1930s setting as much as possible. Rico Angelo to one side – he’s largely modelled on Al Capone – this is a film with 1950s sensibilities and looks, music, costumes, the lot, and Ray’s attempts at 1930s subtexts and weirdness don’t add up to much.
But if Ray was disappointed he doesn’t show it. From the opening second he lays on the visual spectacle to a degree that is almost preposterous, with colour wielded in an extraordinary way. If Angelo is holding a gang meeting in a dingy cellar, it’s a dingy cellar that’s colour co-ordinated to the hilt, all smoky beiges and muted browns. If it’s one of the dance numbers, Ray turns the lights and colours up to the max – one is almost entirely pink with blue accents, another is all leopard-print – and then follows with a contrasting scene, everyone dressed in black.
The lush lighting is by Robert J Bronner, who knew his musicals (he lit Silk Stockings and Viva Las Vegas), Charisse’s dancing is lithe, though the choreography is not much more than high-tone bump and grind, and her clingy costumes (by Helen Rose) accentuate her physical assets. Lee J Cobb is highly impressive as the probably psychopathic Angelo, and when he starts waving around a bottle of acid threatening to chuck some in Vicki’s face, you believe he’s going to do it.
But really it’s Taylor’s film and he achieves in quiet introspective playing what Cobb does with a snarl and Charisse with a high kick – he cuts through.
Party Girl – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
