Handsome Dan wrote:DVR'd
Party Girl from TCM the other night and finally caught up with it yesterday. It's not quite
Johnny Guitar or anything, but it had enough of the usual Ray virtues for a fun night in. Stuff like
Guys and Dolls and
Some Like It Hot must have instilled some expectation in me that '30s gangsters in '50s movies are all buffoonish, lunkheaded comic relief, because I was actually surprised at how violent and scary Lee J. Cobb and John Ireland & co. were here, particularly
all that business with the acid, as well as the scene of Cobb beating the guy with the silver pool cue, which seems to have inspired some similar business in '87 Untouchables).
Biggest shock of the movie comes early on, though, when
Cyd Charisse discovers her roommate's body in the bloody tub! I actually jumped at this a bit; I can only imagine how this played on a giant screen to a 1958 audience unaccustomed to extremes in cinematic gruesomeness.
It's kind of a violent, shocking movie in general, with more "BOO!"s than I'm used to from films of this era. It must have seemed to be in very bad taste at the time.
Charisse's two dance numbers were swell, though they felt sort of shoehorned in - "Cyd Charisse is here, I guess we may as well let her dance for a scene or two." They certainly weren't important to the story in and of themselves, and I didn't get the sense that they expressed anything about the character or made any kind of hay about the movie's theme or anything. But, eh, as obligatory scenes go, not bad.
It's general stylistic stuff that seems to have stuck with me more than the plot, though. It was fun to see the usual sprawling use of the wide format; even for a movie with so many interior scenes of just two people talking, Ray found inventive ways to move the actors around the frame. Charisse's outrageously red costumes were great as well (especially near the end when she was on the train "to the coast", where you'd think she wouldn't want to be noticed!). I love the '50s color palette, and it seems like Ray did as well; again, I can only imagine what this looked like when first projected from a new print in a large format.
I may pick up the Warner Archives disc of this if it's not a total disaster. Is it at least a measurable improvement over the VHS copies that are likely floating around in junk shops across the US?