I'm back. You know the drill for when I miss a post; no movie generally equals no post nowdays, cause all I do is work otherwise, and I don't wanna just bitch about politics or whine about other stuff, though I don't rule out doing those things on occasion, lol. Anyway, I didn't watch a movie last night but I did tonight : "Party Girl" (1958) starring two of my favorites, Robert Taylor and Cyd Charisse. Taylor plays an attorney who works exclusively for brutish mobster Lee J. Cobb, in one of his most loudmouthed and boorish roles, which is saying something. Taylor specializes in gaining the sympathies of a jury, which is why he can secure "not guity" verdicts for even the most heinous of Cobb's henchmen. However, he is quietly ashamed of his work. He only does it because it pays well, he is good at it, and because Lee J. Cobb won't like it if he tries to quit.
Cyd Charisse is a showgirl, a dancer in a Vegas-type revue at a club owned by Cobb. As the movie opens, she has just finished work for the night and along with the other dancers is offered one hundred bucks to attend a party being thrown by Cobb. It is attended by the kind of Crumb Bums you can imagine, hoodlums in pinstripe suits (and I forgot to mention that the setting is Chicago in the 1930s). Cyd doesn't want to go to the party because she knows what the hundred bucks entails, but the other girls tell her not to say no to Cobb. The showgirls know their way around. Most of them can get through the night with just some flirting and conversation with the drunken mobsters, and then they can go home. But Charisse is like Robert Taylor, silently ashamed that she works for Cobb, with enough fortitude to resist the excesses of her employment. There are lines she won't cross.
But she takes the hundred bucks this time, and one of the first persons she meets at the party is Robert Taylor. There is a thug in attendance, a hitman (John Ireland, who we just saw as The Psycho in "I Saw What You Did"), who has the hots for Cyd and puts his paws on her, but as it turns out, this guy is beholden to Taylor, who is about to defend him on a murder charge. Taylor is a gentleman among apes, and he shuts the thug down. Cyd Charisse is grateful, and a relationship begins to form, though it takes time to develop because Robert Taylor is not enamored of showgirls, having previously married one with less than outstanding results. He dislikes the whole scene; the nightclubs, the gladhanding hoodlums, it's all so lowbrow.
Slowly but surely, he comes to see that Charisse wants out too. She clearly has feelings for Taylor but he doesn't trust her judgement because he is also partially disabled. He walks with a cane due to a shattered hip that never healed properly. His first wife, the other showgirl, eventually left him because he was a "cripple" in her eyes (a horrible word that used to be the common description for a disabled person), Taylor feels certain that Charisse will eventually feel the same about him and desert him, too, but here's where the movie takes a detour into medical drama. Taylor is told by his doctor about a new surgical procedure available in Sweden to reconstruct his hip. Suddenly, we are there for ten or fifteen minutes. Taylor is re-Alice Cooperating in the Swedish facility; Cyd Charisse comes to visit, and now we are in Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn territory, with the couple gaily driving the mountain roads, top down, hair in the breeze, falling in love.
The director of "Party Girl" is Nicholas Ray, who like Douglas Sirk knew his way around a melodrama. So all of a sudden you go from Chicago to Sweden, from thugs to a European love affair, but then Ray drags you right back again. In Sweden, Robert Taylor gets a call from Cobb, who is about to be indicted by the Illinois Attorney General.
Shades of Trump once again, and I love it. So do you.
By now, Taylor and Charisse are rock steady and plan to be married eventually, if Taylor's first wife, to whom he is still legally wed, will give him a divorce.
This is another movie in which so much stuff happens in 99 minutes, that you feel as if you are watching an Epic. The last 40 minutes of the film becomes a thickening of the Chicago mobster plot that would not be out of place in "The Godfather", and I think once again - because of the detailed art direction and period photography, and the impending threat of graphic violence, that this movie may have been an influence on filmmakers to come, like Coppola and Scorsese. Lee J. Cobb's disgusting portrayal in particular, and his willingness to use the most cruel measures to threaten Taylor when the going gets rough, was surely a measuring stick for future motion picture Mob leaders. You just know that other actors and directors saw this film and were influenced by it.
The storyline is slightly oddball, turning from Mob politics and a budding romance, to a courtroom drama, and then to the medical/romantic interlude in Sweden. Only Nicholas Ray or Douglas Sirk would go there and do all that in one film, so it's an odd script in that sense. But it works because of Robert Taylor and Cyd Charisse. They have the Star Power Charisma to pull it off in spades, in dramatic conflict against the amoral Cobb and his psychopathic sidekick Ireland.
I found "Party Girl" in a search of the name "John Ireland" in the Library database. I was so impressed with his performance in "I Saw What You Did", that I wanted to see more of his work. So I got a special bonus because the movie I found starred Taylor and Charisse. And as an extra perk, you get two Cyd Charisse mega-MGM dance numbers as well, right out of the blue.
It's a weird picture because of the combination of elements, but they all come together in the end to make "Party Girl" a great Mafia Crime story set against a romance in Depression-era Chicago.
Two Thumbs Up, then. See all the Robert Taylor and Cyd Charisse movies you can.
A nice hike at Aliso this afternoon, in 96 degree weather.
See you in church in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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