The Party's Over (1965)
Overview
A group of close friends spend their time drinking and partying. When the American fiancé one of them shows up, the clique protects her by hiding her from him. He slowly becomes deeper involved with the wild bunch while the party rages on. This once controversial British movie was filmed in 1962 but not released until three years later.
Cast
Oliver Reed
Moise
Clifford David
Jed Carson
Katherine Woodville
Nina Jarvis
Ann Lynn
Libby
Louise Sorel
Melina Morgan
Eddie Albert
Ben Morgan
Mike Pratt
Geronimo
Jonathan Burn
Phillip
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CinemaSerf
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.
