(Party Girl, Election)
Approaching the backend of the Nicholas Ray retrospective this week, one thing’s become clear: that crime and romance does mix. Maybe not so much in the throwaway heat of Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino in On Dangerous Ground – a scurry towards one of those scripted fade-to-black embraces that’s par-for-the-course when it comes to sealing things with a kiss – but when the groundwork’s laid from the very first frame (case in point: They Live By Night), there’s not a better cocktail of genres to be found. And in the hands of Ray, the clash of material doesn’t just fizzle, but pops, exploding from the screen with all the nucleus of a chemical reaction.

Party Girl comes almost ten years after Ray’s debut. It’s a Technicolor noir laced with dirty rotten scoundrels, cabaret numbers and a hot-to-trot affair that cements the splicing of love with violence as one of Ray’s most fruitful playgrounds in an iconic career. Frothing beneath the climate of thirties gangland Chicago is of course a romance – one between a wily mob lawyer played by Robert Taylor, and the classy showgirl pinup of Cyd Charisse, whose genes Mädchen Amick must have surely been cloned by. Everything works out relationship-wise – violin-strung montage sequences ‘n’ all – but that’s not the half of it. The dark side of the moon is familiar territory for Ray, and pitting the blossom of love up against the might of gang ethics, thugs in suits and Tommy gun hitmen made Party Girl the classic it actually was (it took Cahiers du Cinéma to legitimise the film well after the fact, according to the programme notes). The absence of Johnny Guitar was the retrospective’s only real non-event (although I've been reminded since, that this screened some years ago), but of the five that I managed to see, this proved to be a more than adequate stand in.

Gangsters featured prominently in other festival films, namely Kung Fu Hustle (for sheer volume), and in particular Election, which based its entire cinematic sprawl around the dimly lit underworld of triad politics. Here, it’s all about the tussle for gangland supremacy, and is fought out amongst two of Hong Kong’s biggest chesses: Lok (Simon Yam), and Big D (Tony Leung Ka-fai). The interplay between the two bosses is like that of Michael and Sonny Corelone – one’s cool and calculated, while the other’s hot-headed and explosive – but that everything’s waged over Yum Cha or incense in a veiled ceremonial hush makes for some pretty unorthodox viewing in terms of the gangster movie on a whole. There’s plenty of shouting and threatening and even some killing, naturally, but what’s interesting about this Johnnie To film is that it meanders through the murky waters of power struggle without much in the way of a skirmish. Until, out of the nowhere, it’s like we’re suddenly watching Casino, and everything's turned nasty (like hole in the ground nasty) thanks to a little homicidal license. This isn’t as fun as Throw Down, or as adventurous as Breaking News, but for a director on Cannes’ good books with a reputation for an almost Hawksian command over genre, just about anything To does these days makes mincemeat out of Hong Kong commercial cinema by default.—TW