Showing posts with label Cyd Charisse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cyd Charisse. Show all posts

Party Girl (1958)

Party Girl (1958) is a brassy blast of 50s technicolor dance and jealous showgirl murder misogyny film noir.

Directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Robert Taylor, Cyd Charisse and Lee J. Cobb, and filmed in CinemaScope, Party Girl celebrates like few other mediocre classics, the gazing male and the prancing half naked female, along with such blasts of wowed brass instruments the sound of those fat horns lingers painfully after the fact.

The movie we are talking about describes a perspective often portrayed in media and art that tends to objectify and depict women from a particular viewpoint. 

This perspective often emphasizes certain physical attributes or characteristics of women, positioning them as objects of desire rather than fully realized individuals. 

Tension (1949)

Tension (1949) is a superlative hen-cucked husband murder mystery double identity hard-boiled cop on the case film noir starring Audrey Totter, Richard Basehart, Barry Sullivan, Cyd Charisse and William Conrad.

Tension (1949) sits at the apex of 1940s fantasy film noir in which the darkest thoughts become rampant reality — it is one of the style's best examples of obsessive, uninhibited dark tales of suburban and urban America, involving a doomed marriage, feral morals and weakness. 

The term fantasy refers here to a certain lack of inhibition in the story telling. 

East Side, West Side (1949)

East Side, West Side (1949) is melodrama crime film with noir overtones, starring Barbara Stanwyck, James Mason, Van Heflin, and Ava Gardner. 

It's a film of socialites and infidelity, one of these glimpse-into-the-lives of the rich and popular, and a look at their habits, drinks, dresses, affairs, apartments, moeurs and murders.

In this world it's always a beautiful morning, and the jewels and the dresses sparkle, and platonic relationships spring up, as does the rekindling of old flames. There is a club where they hang out, and a friendly barman called Bill — and it's always time for a straight Scotch.