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hyped garbage

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Anthony Quinn plays a faded football player in need of some hard cash and resorts to kidnapping with all sorts of mayhem resulting.He tries to roll a rich girl and her boyfriend and when that fails, he even tries to force the woman into marrying him. As the film goes along, Quinn becomes more demented, ranting and raving at will.We also see a story here of wealth versus those without it.Jay Robinson, who was always so good in biblical pictures, especially when he played Caligula, turns up as a cohort of Quinn who betrays him when the kidnapped guy offers him more money. This is also a story of when you're down on your luck, it continues that way.

***SPOILERS*** After taking too many hits to the head as a professional football player washed up ex-Redskin running back Big Tom Kupfan, Anthony Quinn, has now become an annoying and pestering moocher to all those whom he comes in contact with. With his few odd-ball friends Big Tom is always planning to rip off unsuspecting people in elaborate con-jobs that mostly has him, who thinks that he's God's great gift to the female species, sweep ladies off their feet with his magnetic as well as animal charms.It's when Big Tom runs into this couple at a local L.A bar Navy Lt.Arthur Mitchell, Arthur Frenz, and his fiancée Erica London, Carol Ohmart, that his career as a con artist comes to an abrupt and shocking end. Getting both Arthur and his girl Erica to go to this sleazy underground beatnik joint "The Fat Man's" Big Tom gets to work on Erica as his friend and partner in crime Gage, Jay Robinson, lifts the keys to Erica's car. While all this is going on Arthur is slowing getting himself drunk on fee drinks supplied by "The Fat Man", Joseph J.Green.It's when the party is over at the "Fat Man's" that the real party begins at Big Tom's place a rundown and decapitated as well as roach and rat infested dive on the beach. With Erica not finding the keys, that Greg lifted from her pocketbook, to her car Big Tom graciously offers her and Arthur a lift home; Not to her and Arthur's place but his! And it's at Big Tom's place that the party to end all parties begins!What amazed me most, besides Mr.Quinn's over the top acting, was how both brainless and naive Arthur and Erica were in not suspecting what Big Tom & Co. were really up to in them trying to rip the couple off! Mindlessly going along like sheep to the slaughter with the very obvious, in what he's planning for them, mentally unbalanced Big Tom the two ended up being kidnapped as well as abused and tortured by him. As it turned Big Tom really got turned on by Erica who caveman style tried to forcefully take her away from her fiancée Arthur. Arthur who was no match for the hulking and sex crazed Big Tom ended up being a punching bag, with Big Tom doing all the punching,throughout almost the entire film! ***SPOILERS*** What finally put an end to Big Tom's sexually inspired insanity was his own fellow misfits Greg and his girlfriend Honey, Kathryn Grant, and pianist Kicks Johnson, Nehemiah Persoff. As things tuned out Big Tom's overconfidence in himself as a con-artist and womanizer in the end worked against him. And in the end Big Tom was brought back down to earth by non other then his estranged girlfriend Honey but not after he ended up wrecking almost everyone's, friends and strangers alike,lives in the movie!

Anthony Quinn's performances are always compelling, especially when he portrays primitives ,(as he does here),whose physical power & aggressive instincts might have made them kings in earlier times, but are merely misfits now. Everyone else does the best they can with the phoney-hipster dialog. Hollywood is well-known for tainting the language & mannerisms of every subculture it touches, but this is the textbook of absurd exaggeration. Even the script itself calls attention to "Honey" being impossible to understand, due to her "hip lingo". The implication is that Lt Mitchell, who mentions it, is too "square" to "get" her. Well then, so am I, for there are at least 3 characters who are so severely hip that they're virtually indecipherable. Perhaps if this was taken a step further into absurdity, & made an out-and-out comedy, it would be quite good. As is it's not authentic & not funny either. 5 stars for Quinn.

This lurid hostage melodrama with sexual overtones must have seemed pretty hot stuff back in 1956 (in fact it was as the UK censors initially refused it a certificate until it was subsequently cut for the most prohibitive X certificate), but like other delinquency dramas of the time BLACKBOARD JUNGLE and THE WILD ONE time has softened many of its harsher elements even if it hasn't quite smoothed of all of its rough edges. Beatnik pianist Kicks Johnson (Nehemiah Persoff – yeah, right!) tells us a cautionary tale from the previous year when he was part of the extended rootless network of broken- down ex-football star Tom Kupfen (Anthony Quinn) – the "wild party" of the title who was in desperate need of quick cash – as well as the easily influenced wayward middle- class teen Honey (Kathryn Grant, the future Mrs Bing Crosby) and suited-up sneering cowardly knife-man Gage (Jay Robinson), who learnt to pass for respectable by hanging out where else but at the movies. One night, Gage persuaded society beauty Erica (Carol Ohmart) and her somewhat reluctant military fiancé Lt. Arthur Mitchell (Arthur Franz) to leave their swanky hotel bar for some "safe excitement" watching jazz pianist Kicks in a downtown cellar bar. Here, the slobbish Tom made the first of a series of brutish plays for Erica (who may not have initially been that reluctant to receive the attention) before a plan took hold to kidnap the upscale "square" couple and extort cash from one of Arthur's connections. Director Harry Horner's most notable works from the period were the earlier RED PLANET MARS, BEWARE MY LOVELY and VICKI (the remake of I WAKE UP SCREAMING) although he enjoyed a near 40 year career as a production designer on the likes of THE HUSTLER, THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY and THE DRIVER and there's something of the latter films' attention to seedy nocturnal detail present here. What Horner served up is another 1950s example of the DESPERATE HOURS middle-class nightmare of the great unwashed fetching up on their doorstep to try and drag them to their doom (a theme that previously surfaced in THE PETRIFIED FOREST but that here seems to foreshadow the likes of LADY IN A CAGE, THE INCIDENT and even THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT). However, this effort suffers from a somewhat wordy script by its source novel's author John McPartland (whose edgy Gold Medal paperback originals are well worth tracking down and whose novel NO DOWN PAYMENT became a key if somewhat elusive late 50s skewering of middle-class ideals) that generally tells rather than allows the film to show and therefore results in a movie which often seems somewhat stagy and static. That said, there's still an often seemingly authentically sleazy atmosphere pervading this long dark night of the soul for the hapless swells and lower depths denizens and if the ending seems rather abrupt and slightly ambiguous as to the fate of one of its principal characters it's nevertheless a punchy and pungent tale (like its 25c paperback origins) and is definitely worth the attention of period genre fans.