Cinema: The New Pictures, Nov. 10, 1958

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Party Girl (Euterpe; MGM) is a caricature of an old-fashioned gangster picture, done in a clever but vulgar style. All the usual features are there, but all are comically exaggerated. The Little Caesar (Lee J. Cobb) is a sentimental old sweetie-pie with a heart almost as big as his sneer, who passes out diamond-crusted cigarette cases as if they were candy bars, gets a schoolboy crush on a studio still of Jean Harlow, and in fact has only one fault. He frequently rubs people the wrong way: out. The Big Mouthpiece (Robert Taylor), with his white-piped vests and pencil-line mustache, looks like a proper pallbearer at Dion O'Banion's funeral. The Chorus Girl (Cyd Charisse) is overwearily underworldly.

The violence is parodied too, but in a sly way that permits the moviegoer to lick his lips over the horror just before he sees the humor of a situation—or vice versa. One moment, for example, the audience is snickering at a dumb chorine, and the next it is staring aghast at her lifeless body in a bathtub that seems at first glance to be full of raspberry soda—very picturesque in Metro-color. And during a mob war, when a punk catches a packet, does he do the conventional clutch-and-crumple? Not at all. He explodes in the moviegoer's face like a ripe tomato—quite a bit of business in fast motion.

Unfortunately, the picture's plot (good girl helps bad guy go straight) fits the mood like a concrete overshoe, and the more than generous serving of cheesecake is pretty soggy stuff. In the fleshier episodes, Director Nicholas Ray seems to have striven to achieve a mood that is neither of the '30s nor of the '50s, but that might be said to contain the breast of both worlds.

Home Before Dark (Warner). "Charlotte, you know you shouldn't have coffee on an empty stomach." "Charlotte, you really do smoke too much." "Charlotte, you look so tired. Do go take a nap now." "Charlotte, we simply have to go to Boston and get you some decent clothes." Charlotte (Jean Simmons) has just come home from a mental hospital, where she has spent a year and undergone eight applications of electroshock, and her stepmother (Mabel Albertson) is determined to do her duty by the unfortunate creature—no matter how unpleasant it may be for both of them.

Unhappily, Charlotte's husband (Dan O'Herlihy), a college professor who is usually summed up by those who know him best and like him least as a "stuffed shirt," feels pretty much the same way. He has long since fallen out of love with his wife, but he is glumly prepared to make the best of a bad bargain. After all, a divorce would undoubtedly be harmful to his career. So he sleeps in another room, and punishes her in a thousand small unconscious ways for giving him a guilty conscience, and for keeping him from the woman he cannot, even to himself, admit that he loves—the wife's shapely stepsister (Rhonda Fleming).

As written, the story is a soap opera.