Party Girl

Many years ago, I had friends who where members of the Xenon Dance Company, a modern dance ensemble.  Sometimes, the recording artist, Prince, would host parties in town.  (This was before he lived in his studio at Paisley Park.)  His emissaries would pay the girls in the dance company a hundred dollars each to come to the party and dance with his guests.  In Nick Ray's Party Girl, showgirls dancing at "The Golden Rooster", a big cabaret in Chicago, are paid to attend a party thrown by Rico Angelo (Lee J. Cobb), the figure playing Al Capone in the movie.  We see the girls putting on their sexiest evening gowns for the party.  Most of the girls hide their crisp, new hundred dollar bills paid to them for attending in their brassieres.  But one of them says:  "I need to put this somewhere where it won't be disturbed."  So she shoves the hundred dollar bill in her high-heeled shoe.  Prince and his guests were chivalrous, I'm told, and similar precautions weren't required at his soirees. 

Party Girl (1958) is an intelligent melodrama entangled with a elaborately produced MGM musical.  It's got gangsters and showgirls and so what's not to like.  Eddie Mueller, who introduced the film for TCM, says that Nick Ray was sick and close to breakdown due to his alcoholism and the rigors of shooting on location with Burl Ives in Wind over the Everglades and Richard Burton in Bitter Victory.  He wanted to work close to home in a studio and so accepted the assignment to direct Party Girl, a film entirely produced indoors on a sound-stage in Hollywood -- this was not Ray's preferred way of working but he wanted a job that wouldn't tax him too much.  In fact, the production of Party Girl was vexed as well -- Cyd Charisse, the star, was ill for much of the shoot and her sickness delayed the production.  Ray himself didn't like the final film much and, in later years, preferred not to talk much about it.  But the picture is, for better or worse, marked with Ray's signature themes and, certainly, a visual extravaganza, shot in brilliant, shockingly bright Technicolor in a cinemascope format.  The wide screen shots delivered in long takes are full of fascinating, sometimes inexplicable details, and Ray treats his frescos as fields in which scarlets and burgundy reds point out the details that he wants you to see.  The imagery is arresting in every way and, although the plot is over-complex, the film is compelling, an adult exploration of themes of corruption and complicity with evil. 

The "party girl" of the title is Cyd Charisse in the role of Vicki Grey, the leading showgirl at the "The Golden Rooster" revue.  Charisse looks old and tired in the film -- her face is visibly gaunt in some images and this adds to the film's effect.  She is paid to attend a party put on a by gangster, Rico Angelo -- a drunken orgy in which the mobster is mourning Jean Harlow's marriage (the film is set in the heart of Depression era Chicago -- a place where Ray had gone to college).  At the party, Vicki meets the cynical, but gentlemanly Tommy Farrell (Robert Taylor), a world-weary lawyer and mouthpiece for the gangster.  Farrell, who walks with a very bad limp and uses a cane, rescues Vicki from the importunities of a minor thug, and, ultimately, a complex relationship arises between the lawyer and the show-girl.  The lawyer is literally "crooked" -- he's been maimed by a childhood accident.  Vicki is basically a call-girl, a kind of prostitute, with a  bad back-story -- this is typical of Nick Ray's films:  she was raped when she was fifteen in a dive in Oklahoma and has been a tough cookie ever since that time.  At first, contempt is mutual between the prostitute and the shyster -- but, then, they come to realize that they are both variants of the same person, useful conspirators providing humiliating services to bad people.  The film posits the question:  who's the bigger whore -- Tommy Farrell, Rico Angelo's henchman and mouthpiece, or the prostitute?.  Of course, both the crooked lawyer and the bad girl try to go straight and, as per expectations, they fall in love.  The lawyer literally straightens up when he has surgery in Sweden that corrects some, but not all, of his limp.  Returning to Chicago, Angelo recruits him for one last criminal case defending a psychopathic murderer who has allied himself with the big Chicago boss as his small-town accomplice and gang-leader.  This crook, Cookie, is so vicious that he decides to short-circuit the criminal trial in which he is a defendant by bribing a juror.  The scheme is discovered and the case mistried.  Cookie blames Angelo for the mistrial and a full-fledged gang war erupts.  (Here, Ray uses the time-honored approach of showing the gang-war through a series of short one-shot sequences in which various people are machine-gunned -- this is frighteningly well done and reminds us that Ray could have been a great action movie director if he had been more interested in physical as opposed to psychological violence.  This sequence, which harkens back to Scarface, was obviously influential on Francis Coppola  in similar montage sequences in The Godfather.)  Angelo needs Tommy Farrell's services.  But, instead, the lawyer sickened by the whole mess, agrees to cooperate with the DA.  Farrell knows that he is doomed and so he sends Vicki to the coast.  But she doesn't make it.  Angelo's thugs catch her and drag her back, threatening to pour acid all over her face, to make Farrell recant his witness testimony.  Farrell buys time with his silver-tongued eloquence and, at the last minute, the authorities arrive for a big shoot-out that results in the death of all the gangsters.  (In the shoot-out, the thug who forced himself on Vicki in the early scenes in the movie is lured into the searchlit window and blasted by machine gun fire -- he dies in a cascade of glass.  Angelo tries to hurl the bottle of acid at Vicki but forgets that the lid has been removed, pouring the stuff into his own eyes.  It's all garish and brilliantly shot violence.)  The lawyer and the show-girl walk away from the massacre, disappearing into the jungle of the big city. 

The plot is borderline absurd but it's filled with tremendous set-pieces:  Angelo beats another thug half to death at a testimonial dinner for mobsters in the South Side Club.  Throughout the film, Lee J. Cobb is very frightening as the tightly coiled, obsessive gangster.  In the opening party scene, he plugs a picture of Jean Harlow with five shots from his .45.  A thug threatening Vicki invades her dressing room and burns his hand on one of the lights surrounding her mirror.  When Tommy Farrell's former wife shows up -- a pointless scene that just interrupts the movie -- Ray stages the shot with two brightly lit mirrors duplicating all the action:  the point is that the two women are both the same and different.  It's a startling sequence shot in a way that prefigures some of Fassbinder's more baroque compositions.  At the very beginning of the movie, Vicki's roommate, a showgirl is derided as chubby; she declines to attend the party with the mobsters because she is waiting for her married boyfriend's call -- the man has promised to divorce his wife.  When Vicki comes home from the party with Tommy in tow, she goes in the bathroom and finds her roommate dead in the bathtub.  The suicide has filled the tub with brown-red blood that has lapped over the floor.  We see this only for an instant, but the shot provides the color-key to the whole movie -- as the film proceeds, Ray uses scarlet and burgundy to point out details in the cinemascope image and we are always calibrating those colors against the soupy brown-red of blood in the tub.  Each red alludes to the showgirl's suicide and, further, suggests the perilous situation in which Vicki Grey finds herself -- Tommy Farrell is also married and has a wife who won't grant him a divorce.  (Ray gets red into even monochrome outdoor shots on city streets -- there is always someone selling bright red apples somewhere in the wide-screen image.)  Scenes in which Angelo threatens Tommy are remarkable for their décor -- we see swags of curtain as if from a 18th century grand portrait, satin curtains:  the gangster sits on a weird throne-like chair that seems inlaid with red velvet figures.  The throne has box-like edges that enclose the gangster and is as memorable a piece of furniture as anything in film history -- the only comparable image that I can recall is the red billiard table in Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut.  Several shots feature a large astrolabe, an item that seems to have migrated into the picture from a stage production of Brecht's Galileo -- I have no idea what it's doing at The Golden Rooster but there it is.  When Vicki is brought into the gangster's hideout at the South Side Club, her face is bizarrely bandaged -- it's as if she's already been mutilated by acid.  All of these little details, and there are dozens more, combine to create a film that is intensely interesting, even when your mind wanders a little during the vagaries of the plot.  There are also three impressive dance numbers exploiting Cyd Charisse's expressive legs and buttocks -- she has small breasts but these are also on display throughout the movie as well.  Somehow the MGM costuming department manages to dress her in yards and yards of red silk while she seems to be, more or less, naked.  I didn't like this movie twenty years ago when I saw it in a pan-and-scan version -- you need the full image to appreciate Ray's ingenuity in filling the screen with interesting things to see.