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PARTY GIRL

 (1958)

 Robert Taylor, Lee J.Cobb, Cyd Charisse; dir: Nicholas Ray

While it’s billed as a gangster flick, this is also a Nicholas Ray film.  The core of Party Girl is a couple’s struggle to break free from a tyrannical father figure who refuses to relax the ties that bind, and if that sounds familiar, it is.  Party Girl has basically the same core story as Ray’s then-recent Rebel Without A Cause (1955), although in middle-aged guise.  Don’t sigh – this maturity works in the viewer’s favor with an air of sexual progressiveness that’s positively European.  The couple glide easily into ‘living in sin’ without anyone noticing and later there’s even an unmistakably conjugal visit, smoothed sheets notwithstanding. 

There’s other echoes here of Ray’s oeuvre.  A key disclosure scene occurs with our protagonists dwarfed by a monumental public structure, here a cantilever bridge, giving it a similar ‘figures in a landscape’ impact to the Griffith Park Observatory in Rebel.  Our couple also enjoy a brief interlude of idyllic rural happiness on the road, just as their analogues did in Ray’s They Live By Night (1948).  While in each we know this will be all too cruelly brief before the next crisis, the daytime setting here distinguishes it from the nocturnal getaway of the young lovers in that long distant Ray debut.   Inevitably this symbolism carries through, with the older lovers’ daylight jaunt in Party Girl presaging a better outcome than Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell’s doomed romance in They Live By Night.     

Perhaps Ray had mellowed.  Certainly there’s an empathy with the concerns and frailties of midlife here that contrasts sharply with the fear-inducing, often beastly older men who monster youth in his earlier films, starting with Chicamaw in They Live By Night.   (This figure is still present, here embodied by Lee J.Cobb, but now he’s monstering an older man more his equal.)  Robert Taylor’s gammy leg and grimacing struggle for rehabilitation through the course of Party Girl present a clear film noir metaphor of corruption within, harking back to Double Indemnity (1944) but most especially Everett Sloane’s crippled-inside lawyer in Lady From Shanghai (1948). 

Stark contrast to Taylor’s walking stick is provided by the miniature pool cue Cobb uses to bludgeon a mob rival nearly to death.  Mimicking a notorious Al Capone anecdote featuring a baseball bat, this scene both locates the Cobb gangster boss in that pantheon while simultaneously diminishing his essential strength through his bat’s miniaturisation.  Cues (no pun intended) like this help Party Girl which, though ostensibly set in the gangsters’ 1930s heyday, actually takes very little trouble to achieve period authenticity.  Travelling shots through various car windows reveal roads full of cars from the 1950s, yielding a deliciously disconcerting suggestion that these boxy old Packards are really Tardis-like futuristic time machines! 

The film’s set design is in fact rather timeless, with the garish bad taste of the gangsters’ abodes recalling de Palma’s 1983 Scarface remake more than anything else.  Here the lurid color of Party Girl’s Cinemascope justifies its cost.  Ray remarked on this in his posthumous autobiography, I Was Interrupted, when he said, of a stunning scene early in Party Girl:

“I used red-on-red for Cyd Charisse in Party Girl.  Jimmy (Dean) had been red-on-red on the couch, and it was smoldering danger.  Cyd Charisse with a red gown on a red couch was an entirely different value.” 

And how!  As the sole distaff element in this world of incomplete men, Charisse provides the film’s humanity, alternately tough and vulnerable.  Her charisma is a given, but it doesn’t depend on either color or dancing (both of which are abundant here), as she showed in the low budget black & white noir Tension (1950) where she also excels. 

In the 1950s Hollywood was breathing new life into the old gangster story in films like John Huston’s Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Kubrick’s The Killing (1956).  By contrast Party Girl doesn’t even attempt to renovate this genre and viewed thus only reveals how exhausted the old narratives had become.  But Ray had other concerns, or rather he had some enduring concerns, which unlike the framework in which they’re embedded, were continuing to evolve in Party Girl. 

 -            Roger Westcombe