ChanBot i must have seen a different film!!

Murphy Howard I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Adeel Hail Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Kimball Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

davidcarniglia Really a stunning production. The use of color, especially during the dance sequences, was mesmerizing. It seems odd to say that about what is essentially a film noir, but the fireworks of sets and costumes make Party Girl unique.Still, it takes at least an hour for the plot to get rolling. Then the sociopath Cookie suddenly puts Robert Taylor's character in jeopardy; and Taylor isn't in the clear until the last scene. All the while we're left wondering if Cyd Charisse's character is going to be doused with acid. Fortunately, the prosecutor comes up with a clever strategy to force Lee J. Cobb's hand. It would seem obvious, though, that Vicki (Cyd Charisse) will be abducted by Angelo's (Cobb's) goons. Also, after Taylor's released from jail and finds Cobb, why would the police launch an all-out assault on the building, since Taylor could easily get killed too? The fact that he had a sentimental talk with the cops at the very end shows that they were on the same side.The movie almost lost me with the side-trip to Europe. What was the purpose of Taylor's having an old injury that needed surgery anyway? If we had gone directly from Taylor's romance with Charisse right to the complications with Cobb and Cookie we would have lost nothing. We would've been spared the rare on-location driving scene from the doctor's office in which (as noted in the Goofs column) all the other cars are from the 1950s.Which leaves me wondering: why the movie was set in the 30s? There were still plenty of ruthless gangsters to worry about in 1958. And, well, why not make Cobb an Irish gangster? He looks about as Italian as a Viking. Taylor's plea to Cobb that, despite all his bravado, the gangster is really a decent guy, who wouldn't stoop so low as to disfigure a woman, is full of tension. It's clear that Cobb is fascinated by Taylor, almost spell-bound; but never has the courage to stop striking out against his perceived enemies. Except for that well-written scene, though, Taylor's performance isn't very nuanced, not even as much as Cobb's. The fact that Taylor's Farrell is married has almost no bearing on the plot. That would be strange in any era, even more so in tbe 30s or 50s. A strange, awkwardly-paced, but extremely watchable movie. Charisse's dancing is great stuff, and that nightclub just glows beautifully. Cobb is at his caged-animal best, and there's plenty of wild gun-play. Party Girl is definitely worth looking at.

Spikeopath Crippled Lawyer Thomas Farrell (Robert Taylor) has made a career defending crooks in trials, so much so he's now the front line defender for the Chicago mob. But into his life comes dancer Vicki Gayle (Cyd Charisse), who as he starts to fall in love with her, makes him see that his life is worth so much more than that. However, mob king Rico Angelo (Lee J. Cobb) is keen to retain Farrell's services, at any price it seems.There's no getting away from it, Party Girl (a euphemism for a prostitute) features a very standard formulaic plot. It's also a very misleading title in that it doesn't scream out this is a crime picture. Directed by Nicholas Ray for MGM (his last for one of the big hitting studios), it's adapted by George Wells from a story by Leo Katcher. Supporting the three principal actors are John Ireland & Kent Smith. Robert J. Bronner (Jailhouse Rock) provides photography and the film is a CinemaScope/Metrocolor production.Set as it is in prohibition Chicago, it allows Ray to rise above its simple formula and blend his knack for visual touches with interesting characterisations. If we really are going to cement this in the film noir genre? Then it's more down to the director than anything in the story. Yes there's themes such as alienation, vulnerability and the core essence potential for tragi-love-born out of two characters stuck in differing forms of prostitution. But the script is so weak it needed Ray to put an almost surreal sheen over it. There's exotic dancing featuring prominently, some what a given with the weak Charisse starring (in fairness to her it's one hell of a cliché riddled role), but again Ray crafts in such a way it doesn't let the film feel too sprightly. Something that this lush production is in danger of being at times. Yet line those dance numbers alongside scenes such as a portrait of Jean Harlow being shot to pieces, or of Charisse being questioned by a policeman's Silhouette; and you get an oddity. But a very enjoyable one.This was Taylor's last contract film for MGM, and fittingly it's one of his very best performances. Again one tends to think this is probably down to Ray's coaxing, but regardless, Taylor plays Farrell with vulnerable elegance and a steely eyed determination that carries Charisse along with him. Thus the romance is believable, and yes, engaging. Cobb does another in his long line of larger than life characters. Chewing the scenery as much as his Rico character chews on his cigars. While Ireland is a by the numbers thug for hire and Kent Smith a talking prop. There's a fleeting performance from Corey Allen as baby faced psychopath Cookie La Motte, a character that the film could have definitely done with more of. Here's the main problem with Party Girl, it's just not edgy or dangerous enough. Which in a film involving gangsters, murders and crooked court cases, is an issue is it not? But thanks to Ray and Taylor the film overcomes its many flaws to wind up being a very enjoyable crime-love story based picture. But film noir? Well that's debatable really. But lets not get into that... 7/10

funkyfry This film was made at a time when the classic "studio" system was in collapse, and journeyman genius Nicholas Ray -- who had previously made masterpieces like "In a Lonely Place" for Bogart's Santana Productions, "Johnny Guitar" for Republic Pictures, and a whole slew of top notch film noirs for RKO -- found himself highly employable but somewhat unable to get his own productions off the ground. As such, I think it's fair to describe the film less as a labor of love than a labor of discovering love, and you can almost see the process of Ray finding the secret of various scenes with his actors. It's a better film than any of his subsequent "epic" efforts that I've seen, and perhaps you could even say that in its rather simple story of a disabled mafia lawyer (Robert Taylor) who meets the love of his life (Cyd Charisse) at a tacky mob party the director found an opportunity to comment on the dissolute state of his life and career.The story follow's Taylor's character's attempts to extricate himself from his deep involvement with mafia kingpin Rico Angelo (Lee J. Cobb), who relies on his legal skills to keep him and his buddies -- including the opportunistic Louis (John Ireland) and sadistic, unstable Cookie La Motte (Corey Allen) -- out of prison. One of the things about the film that really interested me was that the DA (Kent Smith) is perhaps more unscrupulous and ambitious than any of the mafia figures. In one of the film's best dialog sequences and one that is most charged with Ray's signature style, we see the DA Stewart trying to convince Tommy (Taylor) to become a "fink." It's as if the two are back in the courtroom, where we first saw Stewart, but with only the audience as judge. Tommy acquits himself well in his own defense: "my expertise is in defending the guilty man, and you've made it your business to make the innocent man seem guilty." Stewart remonstrates him: "when are you going to get smart and play along?" Tommy has an answer for that too: "when are they going to start making you a Senator?" Stewart: "As soon as you start talking." What's fascinating about this scene, and also the scenes between Cobb's character and Taylor's, is the awareness of how a conversation can be like a battle, and in all cases between equal and respectful opponents.Tommy plays on his sincerity, even to the audience, while holding forth with the most insincere of ruses like his continual appeals to the sentiment associated with his "father's watch", which he actually orders in bulk to use as a courtroom prop. It kind of reminded me of Chris Nolan's "Dark Knight" in the way that each time he tells the story of the watch he gives a different version specific to whatever situation he's in at that point, but always involving his father and this idea of a "hardscrabble" upbringing in Chicago. There's a strong thread of nostalgia running through the film, which is itself set in the 1930s Chicago of director Ray's childhood. One of the most remarkable scenes in the film is when Tommy tells Vicki (Charisse) about the injury that made him lame, all while they stand next to the very bridge where it occurred.The film features exceptional performances by Taylor, Cobb and Ireland and the very best performance I've seen by Cyd Charisse. I was able to see it at the Castro Theater in SF as a commemoration of the passing of Ms. Charisse a few months ago, on a double bill with Minnelli's "The Band Wagon." Unfortunately a direct comparison such as that makes her musical sequences in "Party Girl" seem pretty half-baked. The songs and dances are not very imaginative, and are not integrated into the film in any interesting way. Nick Ray seems to be able to get more kinetic power and more of a musical sort of excitement out of the violent montage of mob killings that plays like a color operatic version of the meltdown in Hawks' "Scar Face." "Party Girl" deserves a better fate than its had so far -- it should be released on video so that movie fans can assess its unique contributions to the gangster genre that place it firmly between "Scar Face" and "The Godfather", and yet infused with the "noir" atmosphere that was Ray's expertise. For the director Ray, this was perhaps the last film in which he was able to tell a story based around small and intimate moments as opposed to the huge European productions he would soon become just a small part of himself.

artihcus022 ''Party Girl'', Ray's final film for a major Hollywood studio(after this he worked with independent producers) is a highly baroque work. Screechingly mannerist in places, occasional head-first dives into camp but also remarkable instances of poetry and subtlety and a highly charged social portrait. It is a very discordant work which is to say that it deliberately skewers audiences expectations of a genre film by working as a genre film but stylized in a manner that the clichés and conventions look highly abstract, not unlike a film by Douglas Sirk.''Party Girl'' is shot in CinemaScope and Metrocolor, is produced by Joe Pasternak who was in charge of the second-tier MGM unit. The Leonine studio had by the mid-50's devolved into an organization of penny-pinchers and according to Ray, the only reason this film got made was because it's backers wanted to get rid of it's two stars...Cyd Charisse and Robert Taylor so as to exhaust their run of contracted films as quickly as possible. This explains the fact that more than ''Johnny Guitar''(with it's superlative cast of actors), ''Party Girl'' is the closest Ray came to make a B-Film. The storyline is a standard-issue crime drama and it is by a safe distance the most generic of Ray's major films.That it's still a major film is for me little doubt. Though lacking the strength of his early crime films and his 50's melodramas, ''Party Girl'' is still a deeply compelling film about the universality of compromises in society. The title ''Party Girl'' is essentially a slang for prostitute or for being under someone else's thumb. It refers to Cyd Charisse's character Vicki Gaye, a showgirl who works part-time as escort to various underworld types alongside other gals who work at the ''Rooster Folliers''(no joke). But it also includes mob lawyer Tommy Farrel(Robert Taylor) and applies to everyone else.Ray's distaste for plot apparent in all his films is full in abundance here as the generic outline of this story of crooked lawyer turned straight through the power of love takes on several asides. Like the one-scene appearance of a fellow showgirl who's waiting for her man and whose depression, Vicki stifles as a result of habit and accord over the years. The scene where she walks into her roommate's bathroom and finds her swimming literally in a pool of her own blood in a bath-tub is one of Ray's most embedded images even if(in accord with then censorship) the image lasts only a few micro-seconds before a quick fade-away. Much of the secondary section of the film centers on Tommy's relationship with Rico Angelo(Lee J. Cobb in a towering performance) and there's very little plot driving their very powerful scenes. Tension arises from flaming egos by a mob underling played by John Ireland over Tommy's relationship with Vicki.The film's sense of decor and colour is what we'd call now Fassbinderesque. It's pictorially fascinating and the colours are very eye-catching but the underlying design behind it is a sense of decadence of vulgarity. This reflects perhaps that the underlying subtext of this film is less about gangsters than about Hollywood. With Lee J. Cobb's mix of charisma(like Vito Corleone in ''The Godfather'') and crass vulgarity(like Joe Pesci in his films with Scorsese) stand-in for many studio heads of that period and the two musical interludes(numbers is the wrong word for it) by Cyd Charisse while visually striking is poorly choreographed and seems like a parody of the dying MGM Musicals.''Party Girl'' is a reflection ultimately of what are the results when a great artist and a few good actors are working with conventional plots can achieve. It's a work that's of it's own kind. Not a gangster film entirely, mostly a Film Noir though in colours, visually creative but mostly functional. The decor of the film makes it's genre trappings apparent and obvious revealing and critiquing it's functions yet the scenes between Taylor and Charisse are very much played straight conveying genuine compassion between two characters who have long lost their innocence and are merely doing their best to survive and find a semblance of happiness, a happiness that's threatened not only by the mob but also by the cops who want to use them to catch the bad guys(which has much benefits for their own political careers).What may put off most fans of Nicholas Ray is the graphic violence of the film which is quite unexpected and strong for a film of the 50's. Plenty of bloodletting is on display on this film...of course Ray would say "that's not blood...that's red."