Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?

Leoni Haney Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Ed-Shullivan Of course we have all seen this type of story line a few times, especially if you enjoy the film 'noire of the 1940s and 1950s era. What sets this crime/film 'noire/romance apart from others is the first class performances of the four main characters. The gorgeous gams of professional dancer Cyd Charisse are on full display in her role as Vicki Gaye and she is the love interest of the smartest criminal defence attorney Thomas Farrell played to perfection by Robert Taylor who unfortunately died in the prime of his life and in his career as a first rate Hollywood star.Thomas Farrel is the lead counsel for mob boss Rico Angelo played by Academy Award best actor nominee Lee J. Cobb who rules his crime empire and the streets below him by fear of death or serious injury to anyone who would even consider double crossing him. Now lawyer Thomas Farrell does have a close working relationship with the mob boss Rico Angelo who pays him top dollar for keeping him and his cronies out of jail even when they are up on murder charges. Such is the case with Louis Canetto played by John Ireland who is charged with murder but gets off due to the masterful defence strategy used by his lawyer, Thomas Farrel. Louis Canetto has his eyes set on the pretty party girl Vicki Gaye but so does defence lead counsel Thomas Farrel. It does not take the gorgeous Cyd Charisse who plays Vicki Gaye long to assess that she will have a much more loving relationship with lawyer Thomas Farrel than she would with the mob underling Louis Canetto.So you can see that this film 'noire has the typical seedy criminal element who require a smart lawyer to continuously defend them, and it has the party girl turned love interest of the brilliant lawyer who is used by the mob boss to get what he wants out of his top notch lawyer Thomas Farrell. Where I see this film excels and where other similar pictures of the era falter is with the high caliber acting of these four main characters such that the film has ended when the audience wants to see more.I give the film a pretty good 7 out of 10 rating.

dougdoepke Nobody could do musicals as well as MGM. Same with costume dramas and period pieces. But when it came to gangster films and westerns, MGM's obsession with production values and movie stars was no asset. In short, the studio over-produced its entries in these two genres that are spare and gritty by nature. Party Girl is a perfect example. For a gangster film, it's glamorized to a fault, from the candy- box colors to Charisse's elaborate wardrobe to the super clean sets to the parade of beautiful people (especially the chorines). And not even the two veteran heavies, Cobb and Ireland, can compensate. Thus, what should be explosive gangster grit turns instead into squishy studio eye-candy.But then no one can fault Robert Taylor for not trying. He's deadly earnest throughout as the crippled mob lawyer, but it's about as glum a leading-man portrayal as I have seen. Nonetheless, that's okay since we understand why he's so glum, being crippled and indentured to the mob. The trouble is that it puts a boring one-note performance in the movie's center—just count his changes of expression or even a smile. Charisse, of course, is a real treat for the guys, but no actress even though she too strives gamely. At the same time, the usually reliable Lee Cobb mails in one of his patented loud-mouth portrayals as the voluble mob boss. Still, I'm with the critic who wanted to see more of Corey Allen (Cookie) whose edgy hoodlum provides what the movie needs.Then too, I see nothing of the great director Nick Ray in the results, except maybe for one scene. That's where Angelo (Cobb) presents an award in highly unusual fashion before a banquet assemblage, a noisy El-train in the background indicating the trouble ahead. Then the violence comes like a bolt of lightning, a real stunner almost worth the whole movie. Otherwise, it looks to me like Ray was hemmed in by casting and scripting, and took the unfinished project (Bob Wise started it) as a payday.However that may be, MGM could have wisely gone the Funny Girl (1968) route and done a musical with underworld overtones instead of vice-versa. After all, musicals were the studio's specialty. Because, for all the talent involved, the Party Girl mix just doesn't gel.

writers_reign Given the talent involved Party Girl is something of a damp squib that falls between several stools - gangster, musical, thriller, romance - and fails to satisfy in any. Looking at the cast prior to seeing the thing it was clear that the best actor by a country mile was Lee J. Cobb but he is strangely ineffectual here despite being allowed the odd bellow and snarl. John Ireland who showed some promise in All The King's Men in 1949 was phoning it in by 1958 which leaves the two leads. Robert Taylor was always slightly wooden but he makes a decent stab and whilst Cyd Charisse would never have claimed to be anything more than a fine dancer she too turns in a half-decent performance. On the whole Nicholas Ray fails to pull the strands together though it's quite possible that MGM, cognizant of their success three years earlier with Love Me Or Leave Me which blended singing and shooting albeit in a real life bio-pic of Ruth Etting, thought they might get lucky again if they threw in some production dance numbers midway through a gangster movie. Alas, lightning doesn't strike twice.

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."