PARTY GIRL

Robert Taylor was far too old for the part of a hot-shot lawyer in Nicholas Ray's "Party
Girl", (and much too wooden an actor to make the character convincing), but leading lady Cyd Charisse was surprisingly good and certainly never looked more beautiful than she does here. The real star of the picture, of course, is Lee J Cobb whose cigar-chomping gangster just happens to be called Rico. The film is much revered by the French and fits neatly into the auteur theory. It's certainly as hard-boiled and as unsentimental as we have come to expect from Ray and while George Wells' script could be stronger, it's an unusually intelligent genre picture and Ray's superb use of colour and widescreen remains very much in evidence.