The Wild Party Movie Review

Immediately after delivering his second Oscar-winning performance in Lust for Life, Anthony Quinn made two independent films for Oscar-winning art director Harry Horner. The Wild Party, made for Security Pictures, was the second. Horner directed several films between 1952 and 1956 before returning to art direction. (He would be nominated again in 1969 for They Shoot Horses, Don't They?) Imagine, if you can, Quinn, Jay Robinson, Kathryn Grant, and Nehemiah Persoff as…Beatniks. Quinn, then 41, is an over-the-hill football hero (uh-oh) named Big Tom Kupfen. Robinson, then 26, plays Gage Freeposter as a coded, but unmistakably gay hotel hustler. The future Mrs. Bing Crosby, then 23, plays Honey in some sort of a drug haze, although chemicals other than alcohol are nowhere in sight. And Persoff, 36, is Kicks Johnson, the piano playing narrator, who's strung on Honey, who's strung on Tom, who's strung on rich Erica London (Carol Ohmart, then 28) who ISN'T strung on her rich fiance Lt. Mitchell (Arthur Franz, 36) but on Tom, although she doesn't want to be. Sounds sudsy, and the script IS, but Horner's interpretation isn't, and Quinn and Ohmart (who are both excellent) DEFINITELY aren't. Their characters strike genuine sexual sparks together in spite of themselves. (Tom's lamenting his long-lost past and the Lady Erica just wants to be turned ON for a change.) Paul Stewart and Barbara Nichols appear in, alas, just one sequence. Nestor Paiva is his usual colorful self as a club owner named Branson, and even the expository role of an articulate wino is deftly played by William Phipps. The brooding cinematography is by the great Sam Leavitt (Oscar winner for The Defiant Ones and nominee for Anatomy of a Murder and Exodus). The critics blasted The Wild Party and it went absolutely nowhere, but at least it isn't smug and complacent as so many 1956 flicks are. Moreover, it contains enough fascinating elements to warrant a video release. The television prints appear to have been shorn by at least 10 minutes, and considering the direction of Quinn's and Ohmart's psychosexual tango, I'm more than a little curious about what's missing.

1956 91m/B Anthony Quinn, Carol Ohmart, Arthur Franz, Jay Robinson, Kathryn Grant, Nehemiah Persoff, Paul Stewart, Barbara Nichols, Jana Mason, William Phipps, Maureen Stephenson, Nestor Paiva; D: Harry Horner; W: John McPartland; C: Sam Leavitt; M: Ruddy Bregman.