Beat Girls and Hep Cats

Among the numerous Hollywood films that attempted to explore the subculture of the emerging beatnik and bohemian scene of the late fifties, none is odder or more blatantly miscast than The Wild Party (1956) which casts Anthony Quinn as Tom Kupfen, a former star football player turned full time deadbeat, hanging out at basement jazz clubs and dive bars, looking for action. He’s joined by a motley crew of hipster accomplices that includes Kicks (Nehemiah Persoff), a jazz pianist of some talent, Honey (Kathryn Grant), a spaced-out former girlfriend, and Gage (Jay Robinson), a switchblade-toting psychopath.

As the story unfolds in flashback, narrated by Kicks, we see a well-heeled couple, Naval officer Arthur Mitchell (Arthur Franz) and fiancée Erica (Carol Ohmart), enjoying…

As the story unfolds in flashback, narrated by Kicks, we see a well-heeled couple, Naval officer Arthur Mitchell (Arthur Franz) and fiancée Erica (Carol Ohmart), enjoying a night on the town. Targeted as easy victims for theft, they are lured to a sleazy little nightspot by Gage with the promise of hot jazz and excitement. They get much more than that and thus begins a long day’s journey into night.

In some ways The Wild Party plays like an early precursor to Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972) with the middle-class, represented by a square white couple, being brutalized by the dregs of society. Though the film isn’t nearly as bleak or misanthropic as Craven’s cult sickie, it is also a cautionary tale with a conservative moral tone lurking just beneath the surface. One could actually see it as a reaction against the entire Beat Generation Movement and such cultural icons as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg who advocated nonconformity and experimentation. For in this lurid little melodrama, directed by Harry Horner (Red Planet Mars, 1952), the hipsters are the villains and their boring victims become the sympathetic heroes by default.

Gage (Jay Robinson) introduces Erica (Carol Ohmart) to ex-football star Tom in a cautionary tale about beatnik culture – THE WILD PARTY (1956).

Seen today, The Wild Party is more interesting for the talent in front of and behind the camera and its excesses which, at times, approach the overt theatricality of an Off-Broadway play. The screenwriter is John McPartland whose other work includes the script for The Lost Missile (1958) and the novels No Down Payment and The Kingdom of Johnny Cool, both of which were adapted for the screen.

The dialogue is a non-stop laugh riot and typical of Hollywood’s idea of how beatniks talk with a zonked-out Kathryn Grant, looking for a fix, asking “You fat?” to Nehemiah Persoff’s jiving musician who responds, “Baby I’m clean. I’m so thin it’s a sin.” The attempt to capture the essence of this particular counterculture is established from the first frame with Persoff’s free-form riffing on what went down: “Come with me. Descend. It’s another planet. Cool and crazy. It was an evening in June. It was a nervous Monday. A man came looking for money. A big man, a powerhouse. Big Tom we called him. The cockeyed, lopsided king of all cats. Ex-football player, ex-hero, ex-person, a monster, half man, half boy.”

Honey (Kathryn Grant) freaks out in the driver’s seat in a scene from THE WILD PARTY (1956), directed by Harry Horner.

On the plus side The Wild Party is beautifully lensed in black-and-white by three-time Oscar nominee Sam Leavitt (Anatomy of a Murder, 1959) with the opening narrative capturing the nocturnal sights of downtown Los Angeles and such long gone landmarks as the Melody Bar which gangster Bugsy Siegel used to frequent and is now known as The Viper Room.

Married couple Arthur (Arthur Franz, left) and his wife Erica (Carol Ohmart) find themselves trapped with a violent beatnik named Tom (Anthony Quinn) in THE WILD PARTY (1956).

The swinging, kinetic music score, composed by Emmy award-winning Buddy Bregman, is equally apt and features The Buddy De Franco Quartet in one showcase sequence. In addition, cult director Irving Lerner (Murder by Contract [1958]) served as supervising producer with Oscar nominated screenwriters Philip Yordan (Broken Lance [1954]) and Sidney Harmon (The Talk of the Town – Best Original Story nominee [1943] serving as executive producers.

Anthony Quinn is miscast as a rebellious beatnik who hates society and takes it out on a suburban couple in THE WILD PARTY (1956).

Where The Wild Party goes off the rails is in Anthony Quinn’s overblown performance as the volatile gang leader and Jay Robinson’s knife-welding sadist who is so unintentionally funny as Big Tom’s sidekick that whenever they’re on the screen, the movie works better as a parody of the bohemian beat scene than the intense melodrama which it clearly aspires to be. Almost as funny is Kathryn Grant’s somnambulant bohemian who takes an unexpected turn in the final scene, much to Big Tom’s detriment. In one of the most overwrought scenes with a hysterical Erica trying to break out of a locked room in an abandoned warehouse, Grant’s character impassively tells her, “I can’t help you. There’s no way out. Just go inside yourself. Close off the world.”

Nehemiah Persoff doesn’t come off much better with his steady patter of cool cat dialogue like “Baby, let’s get lost tonight.” Only Carol Ohmart, who made such a sexy villainess in House on Haunted Hill (1959), occasionally hits the right note of fear and bewilderment at her situation: “You read about these things in the paper. They never happen to you.”

The big mystery is why Quinn agreed to make The Wild Party at this point in his career. He already had one Oscar win under his belt for Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! (1952), had appeared to great critical acclaim in Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954) and was on the verge of being nominated again for Best Supporting Actor in Lust for Life (1956), made the same year as The Wild Party. Despite his fine work in those films, Quinn gives a full-throttle, bull-in-a-china shop performance here as a restless, thrill-seeking Neanderthal, constantly threatening to rape Erica, his hostage for the evening: “You’re gonna get to know me.” Combined with the extreme earnestness of the other actors, which also includes minor roles for Paul Stewart and Barbara Nichols, Quinn’s overacting reaches such heights that it becomes perversely enjoyable to watch.

There have been several films that bear the title The Wild Party, including the 1929 Clara Bow comedy-drama, directed by Dorothy Arzner, and the 1975 James Ivory film, loosely based on the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, which starred James Coco and Raquel Welch.

This 1956 melodrama is easily the most obscure and will probably remain that way for obvious reasons. Released theatrically by United States, this independent production from Security Pictures has never been released on DVD or Blu-ray in the U.S. or has it? I see that there is a Spanish import of The Wild Party in English available through online sellers if you own an all-region DVD player (the only way to view it). You may also be able to stream it on various media platforms like Prime.

*This is a revised and expanded version of an article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

Bad things happen during a night on the town in the anti-Beat culture melodrama THE WILD PARTY (1956) starring Anthony Quinn and Kathryn Grant (on right side of the frame).

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