Nicholas Ray's Party Girl is a combination musical, film noir and gangster film and Nicholas Ray's last film in the United States. It was also the last MGM film for contract players Cyd Charisse and Robert Taylor, who play lovers who discover each other in their overlapping worlds of meretriciousness, Charisse as a "party girl" and Taylor as a lawyer for the mob. In some ways it is a paean to the gangster films of the thirties but like many period films it is more about the time in which it was made -- Ray was not allowed to use music from the period and one can even see cars from the fifties in some scenes with back projection. Charisse's dance numbers were staged by MGM's choreographer Robert Sidney but with their eroticism, camera movement and use of primary colors look unlike anything else Sidney has done and suggest Ray's close involvement.
Party Girl is in cinemascope and color and in 1958 most films were still in black-and-white, so Ray (and other directors of the period, particularly Douglas Sirk) were constantly inventive and analytical about their use of color and the widescreen. Ray was particularly precise in his use of primary colors and since he was not allowed to shoot on location in Chicago (where he grew up) he created an isolated milieu in which every character was trapped by their surroundings, though Taylor and Charisse were able to escape -- at least temporarily -- as mob boss Lee J. Cobb destroyed himself before he could destroy them.
No comments:
Post a Comment