Coming Soon
PARTY GIRL
1958
Director
Nicholas Ray
Starring
Robert Taylor
Cyd Charisse
Lee J. Cobb
Runtime
99 min
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A gangland lawyer and a lounge singer/call girl rebel against their underworld ‘family’ in this stunningly stylized film noir. A film that might be regarded as Nicholas Ray’s farewell to Hollywood (if not commercial filmmaking), PARTY GIRL is a flamboyant poem in delirious color and CinemaScope treated with a sort of lyricism unique to Ray. This is the only movie he made at MGM and he makes the most of the production resources available transforming a commissioned piece with an imposed screenplay into a baroquely stylized love story exploding with exoticism and violence.
PARTY GIRL was a cause celebre at Cahiers du Cinéma during that magazine’s golden age. When less enlightened critics focused on the formulaic aspects of the film, writer Fereydoun Hoveyda unleashed one of the most glorious panegyrics of Cahiers auteurism:
“Ray's new film proves the mastery of its author and reveals the very essence of an art which is stilI unrecognized. PARTY GIRL has an idiotic story. So what? If the substratum of cinematic work was made up simply of plot convolutions unraveling on the screen, then we could just annex the Seventh Art to literature and hand over Cahiers to literary critics.
There are torrents of inventiveness here. Every sequence is a cascade of ideas. And if people insist on thinking that PARTY GIRL is rubbish, then I proclaim, 'Long live this rubbish which so dazzles my eyes, fascinates my heart and gives me a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven.' What indeed could be more beautiful than two people struggling against themselves and breaking down the barriers they had ingeniously constructed to shut themselves off from the world (or to dominate it, which comes to the same thing)? ‘Strangers here on earth.’ For in the last analysis Nicholas Ray's authority is such that he can shape an anecdote which is no better or worse than any other so that it conforms to his own view of the world, his own conception of human relationships.
The beauty of PARTY GIRL exists only through cinema, a particularly modern cinema which brushes aside all conventions as if they were just the icy perfection sought for by those who have no heart. A cinema which is not afraid of exaggerating, of sacrificing everything to expression and to the effectiveness of a reflex or a look. To remain insensitive to the thousand beauties of Nicholas Ray’s PARTY GIRL is to turn one’s back resolutely on the modern cinema, to reject the cinema as autonomous art.”
Forty-five years later, the critics who dismissed the film are forgotten and the cult of Ray’s sleek, eruptively colorful tale of gangsterland amour fou lives on.
PARTY GIRL was a cause celebre at Cahiers du Cinéma during that magazine’s golden age. When less enlightened critics focused on the formulaic aspects of the film, writer Fereydoun Hoveyda unleashed one of the most glorious panegyrics of Cahiers auteurism:
“Ray's new film proves the mastery of its author and reveals the very essence of an art which is stilI unrecognized. PARTY GIRL has an idiotic story. So what? If the substratum of cinematic work was made up simply of plot convolutions unraveling on the screen, then we could just annex the Seventh Art to literature and hand over Cahiers to literary critics.
There are torrents of inventiveness here. Every sequence is a cascade of ideas. And if people insist on thinking that PARTY GIRL is rubbish, then I proclaim, 'Long live this rubbish which so dazzles my eyes, fascinates my heart and gives me a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven.' What indeed could be more beautiful than two people struggling against themselves and breaking down the barriers they had ingeniously constructed to shut themselves off from the world (or to dominate it, which comes to the same thing)? ‘Strangers here on earth.’ For in the last analysis Nicholas Ray's authority is such that he can shape an anecdote which is no better or worse than any other so that it conforms to his own view of the world, his own conception of human relationships.
The beauty of PARTY GIRL exists only through cinema, a particularly modern cinema which brushes aside all conventions as if they were just the icy perfection sought for by those who have no heart. A cinema which is not afraid of exaggerating, of sacrificing everything to expression and to the effectiveness of a reflex or a look. To remain insensitive to the thousand beauties of Nicholas Ray’s PARTY GIRL is to turn one’s back resolutely on the modern cinema, to reject the cinema as autonomous art.”
Forty-five years later, the critics who dismissed the film are forgotten and the cult of Ray’s sleek, eruptively colorful tale of gangsterland amour fou lives on.
Part of the program
WAKE UP, THE UNIVERSE HAS ENDED: NICHOLAS RAY IN CINEMASCOPE