I’ve been hearing the term “dream ballet” tossed around with unusual frequency lately, due to that glamorous Old Hollywood indulgence enjoying a resurgence in the Oscar nominees Maestro & Barbie.  Both films feature an abrupt break from reality in which their male leads slip into a dream dimension to express their abstract emotional state through the art of balletic, interpretive dance – something much more common to the grand movie musicals of Hollywood’s Golden Era than to the overly cynical, logical filmmaking landscape we’re currently trudging through.  It shouldn’t have surprised me, then, that all of this “dream ballet” chatter was echoed in my recent thrift store Blu-ray purchase of the Old Hollywood classic Party Girl, which stops its real-world story of doomed lovers on a mobsters’ payroll in its tracks to indulge in a few escapist sequences of fantastical dance.  Where Party Girl‘s otherworldly dance numbers tripped me up, though, is in the way they subvert & pervert the most timelessly iconic dream ballet sequence in the Old Hollywood canon (the same one visually referenced in the “I’m Just Ken” dream ballet interlude of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie).  In Party Girl, dancer-turned-actress Cyd Charisse reworks her breakout performance in the dream ballet sequence from Singing in the Rain into a show girl strip tease.  The ethereal pinks & purples of Singing in the Rain‘s infinite studio set are retrofitted to the stage of a Prohibition-era Chicago gangster hangout called The Golden Rooster, and Charisse takes a moment in that otherworldly void to flirt with the camera instead of the audience in the room with her.  She’s initially costumed in a showgirl outfit with an eccentrically long train that flows behind her movements—until she removes it in classic burlesque tease—recalling the gorgeous white fabric that trailed her movements in Singing in the Rain.  It turns out her brief dance with Gene Kelley in that film was so instantly iconic that it was already being lovingly referenced just a few years later (decades before Ryan Gosling was even born).

Unfortunately, Party Girl peaks early with that balletic strip tease, and Charisse is given little to do off-stage, despite playing the titular moll.  She stars as 1930s Chicago showgirl Vicky Gaye, who earns extra cash between shows at The Golden Rooster by making paid appearances at mobster parties in private residences (a light, Hays Code-approved form of prostitution).  While working one of these pop-up speakeasy parties, she falls for the mobsters’ suave attorney, a “guardian angel for punks & gunmen” played by a disappointingly stiff Robert Taylor.  Their romance is a dully dignified one, with both parties pushing each other to get out of The Life even though they’re both on the same mobster’s payroll.  Courtroom debates, backroom negotiations, boat trips overseas, and medical crises ensue at a leisurely pace, occasionally interrupted by Tommy-gun fire & mildly salacious dance numbers.  Director Nicholas Ray brings the same eye for lurid beauty that elevates much more essential classics in his catalog like Johnny Guitar, especially in the way he puts the Metrocolor film processing to use in his splashes of gold & red.  Unfortunately, his flair for full-glam Old Hollywood magic is the wrong approach for noir, a genre that would’ve been much better suited for his scrappier early pictures like Rebel Without a Cause.  As a major studio noir, Party Girl is hopelessly bloated, something that’s apparent as soon as it widens the frame into CinemaScope.  It’s still beautiful nonetheless, whether it’s gawking at the vivid reds of a blood-filled bathtub or gawking at the glittering gold & pink sequins of Cyd Charisse’s dance costumes.  By the time she reappears onstage for a second dance break from reality in a leopard print gown, all of the energy of the picture has already bled out in one too many courtroom scenes, which are always death for late-period, major studio noir.

I don’t know that Cyd Charisse’s first big dance number in Party Girl technically counts as a dream ballet, since it’s narratively set up as a nightclub stage act instead of an expressionistic break from reality.  I do know that it’s referencing the go-to standard of dream ballet sequences, though, a connection to Singing in the Rain that’s made apparent enough by Charisse’s casting before it’s underlined in her costuming.  That dance routine also deliberately disregards the physical boundaries of its stage the same way Busby Berkeley used to in his own fantastical dance sequences, treating the camera as the audience POV instead of staying anchored to the extras seated in the room.  It’s the most alive Ray ever feels behind the camera, and it’s the one stretch of the film where Charisse’s screen presence feels irreplaceable.  I haven’t seen Maestro myself, nor am I likely to unprompted, but I can report that I was equally thrilled by the visual Singing in the Rain callback in Barbie‘s dream ballet sequence last summer.  In that moment, I felt the high-artifice movie magic of Old Hollywood return in full force, a sensibility echoed in the over-stylized set & costume design throughout Barbieland.  Hopefully, a third dream ballet sequence in a major motion picture will continue the trend after its repetition in Maestro; it’s one of the most genius tropes invented by the Hollywood dream machine, the kind of overwhelming sensory indulgence that inspires nerds with TCM & Criterion subscriptions to mutter “pure cinema” under our breath.

-Brandon Ledet