Party Girl

In Party Girl, director Nicholas Ray combines explicit blood-and-guts violence with extravagantly staged dance sequences in vivid Technicolor to create a riveting (yet quirky) piece of dissonant cinema that stands alone in the noir cycle. Robert Taylor stars as high-priced attorney Thomas Farrell, who’s made mountains of money defending mob boss Rico Angelo (Lee J. Cobb), occasionally exaggerating his lameness in court to score sympathy points with juries. Cyd Charisse and her legs star as chorus girl Vicki Gaye, who’s appalled by Farrell’s shady legal dealings but falls for him anyway, ultimately benefitting in the form of a raise and promotion at Angelo’s night club. Later, when Farrell’s love for Vicki persuades him to give up his criminal connections, he finds it’s not so easy. In Ray’s hands, the film somehow finds harmony in that the dance numbers are as joyful as the violence is cruel (“Suppose somebody were to take a crowbar to that hip”); one particularly brutal scene in which Angelo suddenly bludgeons a dinner guest was recycled decades later in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables.