The Wild Party

Back in the spring of 2025, TCM did a spotlight on Merchant-Ivory productions, although this time there weren't any of the 1960s films from India where the team got its start. I did a post on the late 1970s movie Roseland a few months ago, but even before that there was The Wild Party.

The Wild Party was, somewhat surprisingly, distributed by American International, and one of the interesting results is that there's something in the cinematography that seems reminiscent of the flatness of some of AIP's other 1970s stuff and not the richness that Merchant-Ivory would have with its period pieces of later years. The movie starts off with a man in a hospital recovering from a gunshot wound and writing a story which, he claims, is based on his real life experience. That man is James Morrison (David Dukes), and as you might guess, most of the rest of the movie is a flashback or depiction of that story that Morrison was writing.

It's late 1920s Hollywood (and I should point out that the hospital scene is also set in the late 1920s), during the transition from silent pictures to sound. Jolly Grimm (James Coco) is a successful silent film comedian who lives in one of those great Spanish-themed mansions, with a mistress Queenie (Raquel Welch) and a servant Tex (Royal Dano). However, as the silent era is fading, so too is Jolly's star beginning to fade. He's been working on a new, more ambitious silent movie that's part comedy and part melodrama, and has decided that the best way to get the distributors interested in it is to host a party where he'll give the assembled Hollywood royalty a screening of the new feature.

However, as you might guess, there are some complications. One is that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks have also scheduled a party for the same night, meaning both that some people Jolly would have invited might not show up at all, while others may or may not be able to stay for the showing of the movie. There's also the fact that a lot of the guests seem more interested in the debauchery of the party, which was part of the reason people went to parties like this in the first place, especially during the Prohibition era.

One of the guests at the party is the sort of new star that Hollywood was looking for at the beginning of the sound era, Dale Sword (Perry King). He's young and handsome, and it's no surprise that he and Queenie wind up somewhat interested in each other, which is bound to get Jolly ticked off if he finds out. For Jolly's part, there's also the arrival of the young ingenue Nadine who is hoping to break into Hollywood by auditioning for Jolly. She's much too young to be involved with a party like this, especially as the night goes on and everybody seems to get drunker and drunker. That much alcohol is bound to cause somebody to lose their temper and tragedy to strike. Not that we didn't know this was going to happen considering how the movie starts.

I have to admit that I recorded The Wild Party not realizing that it was part of the TCM spotlight on Merchant-Ivory, and was surprised to see their name show up on something with James Coco as the star. Coco was the sort of zany comic who I think worked best in smaller doses. As the star of something like this, he's a bit too much. It's not so much that he's bad as he's just misused. The script doesn't seem to know whether it wants to be a straight-up comedy or something more tragic, and the attempt to combine the two winds up in a misfire.

Thankfully, The Wild Party didn't hurt the careers of Merchant and Ivory, and they were able to go on to much bigger and better things.