The Party's Over

Apparently controversial in 1963 when it was made (I don't remember it), The Party's Over is evocative of so many films i saw around that time in the cinema when I was seventeen. Guy Hamilton the director removed his name from it and moved on to making James Bond films. It's still a curiosity though to anyone like myself who likes to wallow in nostalgia for b/w movies, full screen and suffused with a jazz soundtrack and familiar faces from that pre Beatles era. Louise Sorel is the daughter of an American businessman and is now slumming it with some beatniks in London. Her father, played by Eddie Albert (giving the most professional performance) sends Clifford David over here to rescue her. He is her fiance and works for her father and he comes over to where he thinks she will be living but is unable to find her. The truth is she's avoiding him. Oliver Reed and others have designs on the young lady as well and they all meet in a den where booze flows freely and cigarette smoke clouds the air. Whether there were any drugs available there, I couldn't see but they may have been using more than just booze from the state of some of them. After the party they walk in a gang, zombie like, across one of the bridges in London and Oliver Reed (way over the top) flicks his cigarette butt at the watchful copper on the beat. He wouldn't get away with that today. The viewer gas the impression that these are quite well off middle to upper class young people as they seem to have plenty of money for drink and lazing around. This inevitably leads to tragic circumstances, given the amount of booze flowing and the rather banal script needing something dark to keep our interest. The cast is let down by a weak lead in Clifford David, an actor I've never heard of before. He takes a liking to the beautiful Catherine Woodville and she to him. She gives one of the best performances in the film but they lack chemistry I thought. Oliver is way over the top with his acting but he was on the verge of breaking through in a big way as I well remember and I went to most of his subsequent pictures in the sixties. Ann Lynn plays another of his clingy girl friends and is quite good also. I kept thinking how sad it is now that these young actors on the up, have now mostly left us. Mike Pratt, famous on TV was also a songwriter and here plays a beatnik. He died young at 45 from lung cancer but he wrote a lot of songs with Lionel Bart for Tommy Steele, including the children's favourite, Little White Bull sung by Tommy. As I say, this I found a curiosity, having missed it at the time and I couldn't resist a nostalgic look, although it's not very good.

Executive Producer Peter O'Toole and Jack Hawkins along with director Guy Hamilton took their names off this controversial British Beatnik flick where an American girl, missing from her New York tycoon father and businessman fiance, is supposedly raped/screwed after death: so for them it wasn't controversial enough...

Yet no actual necrophilia occurs (unless you count a quick posthumous kiss), even in the restored cut when -- a day before THE PARTY'S OVER -- Oliver Reed and his wayward cohorts play cat-and-mouse with Clifford David as the rich chick's arranged fiance, Carson...

Who's flown to England to not only get his girl back, but to know her, period, while she (Louise Sorel) is content with the breezy freedom among the eclectic crew of brooding Brits, either drinking and smoking while digging hot jazz when not coming down in the usual melancholy, philosophizing manner...

But it's not all emotional highs and lows since in its foundation, this is a Noirish, non-linear crime/mystery sporadically told through flashbacks provoked by the American's initially basic quest...

And he eventually becomes involved in a flirtatious, hang-around romance with the prettiest, wisest, seemingly most helpful English girls in Katherine Woodville's Nina, who, donning a slick black bowling hat and matching black cane, is lovestruck despite the secret she and the others are holding back...

As the most shocking and refreshing aspect -- much different than other counter-culture themed films -- is that the suit-and-tie fiance (a dapper-handsome hybrid of Robert Mitchum, Alan Badel, Cornel Wilde and Liam Neeson) is not the usual cliché idiotic conservative-square to make the progressive cool kids seem that much cooler...

So Clifford Davis's buried lead feels more like an even-keeled, experienced gumshoe, questioning (in vain) a goading, moody Oliver Reed, the passive-aggressive leader of the eclectic gang...

Each member foreshadowing the future punk rock movement of total individuality despite a sort of zombie-like/like-minded camaraderie (including Reed's big bald German sidekick; his cheated-on blues-crooning moll; a suicidal college student; and a gay messenger boy)...

But it's a shame these spontaneous, otherwise freewheeling nomadic scoundrels are so bogged-down by the previous night's crime (actually more of an unreported tragic accident)...

A burden that hinders their each and every step as, compared to the potentially awesome opening credits where the group coolly wanders across a bridge at a murky dawn, they could have been far more character-driven than guilt-ridden in what ultimately winds up a pre-Goth/Gothic romance about existential life (and love) after death.

The opening bars of the jazz-style theme alerts us to the likely seedy nature of this gritty tale of a young woman who arrives from a wealthy upbringing in the USA in 1960s London. She falls in with a rather Bohemian band of reprobates known as the "Pack", a group of young people who live a pretty disparate existence - sex, drugs, rock and roll - you know the story - and Oliver Reed is quite effective as their leader "Moise". Tragedy ensues, though, and the group must face up to some of their excesses with varying degrees of honesty and success. It's trying to be visceral, this film - it swipes at the tribal, almost feral nature of relationships amongst the group who have a moral compass all of their own. Although Guy Hamilton spares us the worst of the physical manifestations of their behaviour, our imagination is quite capable of plugging the gaps. The censors had a whale of a time with this - and even now, it isn't hard to see why - some of the taboos it addresses would still be treated gingerly even today - 55 years later. The photography does much to enhance the earthiness of the production, close ups proving particularly effective alongside the score. Reed really steals the film, too - with the young Louise Sorel "Melina" - the aforementioned daughter; and Katherine Woodville "Nina" - maybe the only one of them with any semblance of what we might call decency - adding (gunpowder) to the mix too. It's nowhere near as potent as it was, but as an example of groundbreaking cinema it has to be worth a watch.

Somewhere around the middle of the 1950's the teenager became an autonomous commodity in the west, garnering their own, distinctive "movements". In Britain - before The Beatles - the majority of youth identities were extracted from American sub-cultures. In Guy Hamilton's The Party's Over, the youthful group, or gang, are heavily influenced by the beat generation whose poetry and writing confronted political and social change through nihilistic, non-conformist characters and ideologies. Known in popular culture and the media as Beatniks (the "niks" added later in America to codify the group with communist affiliations - the nik was taken from the Sputnik, the Russian satellite that was launched in 1957), Oliver Reed's gang leader, Moise, guides his group through the hedonistic party scene of early 1960's London, opening with a shot of the Albert bridge in the early morning as the partied-out gang mope zombie-like, with Annie Ross's dour theme tune playing on their mournful souls. But what the film seems to focus the majority of its attentions on is the damaging consequences of both group mentality and heavy, prolonged partying. It's a moral tone that both reflects British society.

Along with the iconography of youth gang, with the tribal costuming - contrary to the idea of individuality and non-conformity, it's ironic that these ideas are scuppered by the entourage to the central trend- setting leader, - the film is about the changing political and social setting of Britain. In the still war-torn London of the early 1960's, an American businessman, Carson (Cifford David), has been sent over the Atlantic in search of his fiancée, Melina (Louise Sorel), who has been enveloped by the Chelsea set gang. Carson has been sent over by her father, a rich and powerful businessman himself. The gang, co-ordinated by Moise, send Carson on a cat and mouse chase around London, in search of the girl whom seems to be either an enigma or a skillful evader. It seems to be no accident that the American character is suave, sophisticated, smart and in control of his life, whilst the gang members are rough and without moral values. Britain was losing its Empire, and America was becoming the dominant super-power. The juxtaposition of the two transatlantic male central characters shows the parallel between the optimism of the new power and the degrading attitudes of the dying empire. As Carson begins to move deeper into the gangs secrets and situations, the dark and jarring truth changes everyone around them.

The Party's Over was an incredibly controversial film at the time, and inevitably, the film was problematic for the British Board of Film Censors. At the centre of this contention was a particular scene at a party. Melina is seen laying at the edges of the dance floor. Members of the gang stand over her, mocking her, claiming that she is unable to handle her drink. The scene quickly turns to sinister and depraved areas, which become even harder to swallow once we discover that Melina was in fact dead. The gang, like vultures, dive onto her, pulling her clothes off. A young member of the gang, Phillip (Jonathan Burn), mounts Melina in this scene, kissing and fondling her - an action that he later fatefully regrets. This scene is shown from different perspectives, much like Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950). Unfortunately, due to its very suggestive nature, the British censors cut around 18 minutes from the film, and was overlooked on its release. In the cut released in 1965, the power of the film is totally lost, as these scenes are central to both the films themes and narrative. These cuts also lead to director Guy Hamilton (who would later make his name on several Bond films) and producer Anthony Perry removing their names from the credits.

But it is Reed's central performance that dominates the screen. It is not a large step away from a previous role in Joseph Losey's The Damned (1963), but his brooding, antagonistic presence is illuminating. He mocks and berates at those sycophants around him, bleating at them like a sheep, laughing at their following natures. He does however, respect those who defy him, despite his later moral maturity. In one sense the film offers an insight into the decay of post-Empire Britain, and a glimpse into the moralising of the newly dominant America. But also the film highlights what many youth films tend to forget. These youth movements (particularly in the 1960's - including the later "Hippie" movement) are fundamentally entrenched in privilege. Therefore, whilst the films young characters are rough, violent, self-absorbed, these are the future Representatives of the British class system. Perhaps more the reason for the BBFC's attack on the film: it may well have been a different release if the gang members were from the other side of London, the East-end, as opposed the West.

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Quite splendid London based film containing a towering performance from Oliver Reed amidst his fellow 'beatniks'. Interesting time capsule affair coming as it does as The Beatles break and before the so called 'swinging London'. Dream of an opening with the cast lazily/drunkenly and seemingly aimlessly walking across Albert Bridge in the early morning. Like the film generally, a beautifully shot sequence that clearly references European cinema despite the subsequent American references and cast inclusions. Much troubled history with heavily cut version being released two years after completion and only now available uncut on DVD. Surprisingly frank portrayal of sex and rock 'n' roll without the drugs and even the rock 'n' roll being replaced by jazz. Evocative, illuminating, unnerving and enjoyable with much London location exteriors.