Having just finished watching the movie The Bachelor Party I'm surprised that it isn't all that highly regarded on this site. It's a far better than average slice,--more accurately, slices--of life from a now bygone era when people still sat on stoops of apartment buildings, and if it was a youngish, even plain woman most men would regard her as at least somewhat "available".
The plot of the movie is simple: a bunch of white collar guys, some middle class, others on the fringe, go out on a binge called a bachelor party to celebrate the engagement and impending marriage of one of their fellow workers. What transpires isn't so happy an evening as one might have imagined, and things do not, as time passes and the men get drunker, improve. As is to be expected in films (and at the time, TV dramas), the question of the meaning of life comes up in various forms; as does the issue of whether marriage is worth the grief that often comes along with it; and as the story meanders along, rambling with its characters, larger matters of love and death are brought up; too schematically for my tastes, but there you have it.
It's a decent, at times flawed script, but the superb performances of the major players help enormously; and the character development is good. Some of the parts are meatier than others, but the actors themselves cannot be blamed for this:
Don Murray is a young Everyman with a pregnant wife; he's in night school so as to become an accountant, which will better equip him to support his family. He's the "audience identification" character in what's in many ways a thankless part, but Murray breaths life into it. Jack Warden could have played his standard issue baseball loving bachelor in his sleep, but he didn't. E.G. Marshall's portrayal of a death haunted (and for good reason) book-keeper, is itself haunting, and for me, a revelation, as Marshall generally played men in control of their emotions, not in conflict with them.
Larry Blyden was fine in a small part, while Philip Abbott, whom I've always liked, played his role of the man the bachelor party was thrown for, with beauty, sincerity and an modest, non-showboating realism that made me wish he'd got better parts later in his career. Carolyn Jones made the best of her small beantick role but for the life of me I can't see why she got an Academy award nomination for her few brief scenes.
Joseph La Shelle's photography was Oscar worthy (he didn't win,--I don't know if he was even nominated). As a kind of street-bound, realistic panorama of a now vanished New York City the movie is worth viewing just for that. Not to belittle the story,--it's a good one, albeit prosaic--some of the greatest pleasures of the film are in the way it looks: the subways, the bars, whether neighborhood or the hipster kind, even the men's rooms, the staircases of older buildings. At its best, as the purely visual-spatial level, the film is a joy to behold.
The ending, the way author Chayefsky wound things up too neatly for my tastes, felt quite frankly specious, as if written for suburbanites who want to see city folk as "normal", or trying to be, rather than going their own way, so to speak, at the time an option in urban life; today, not so much, as the cities of today are, culturally, not much different from the suburbs. The lines Don Murray was given to read in his final few moments in the film felt like came from a sermon, not from the mouth of a real human being. Too bad. The movie is mostly talk, which is, when well done, fine by me, but it seemed, in those closing scenes to switch gears too quickly.
Overall, The Bachelor Party is a first rate movie with. admittedly, some issues that kept it from being truly great; and it's certainly worth watching. It does fall short, but not, in my humble opinion, nearly so far as many reviewers have said it does.
The plot of the movie is simple: a bunch of white collar guys, some middle class, others on the fringe, go out on a binge called a bachelor party to celebrate the engagement and impending marriage of one of their fellow workers. What transpires isn't so happy an evening as one might have imagined, and things do not, as time passes and the men get drunker, improve. As is to be expected in films (and at the time, TV dramas), the question of the meaning of life comes up in various forms; as does the issue of whether marriage is worth the grief that often comes along with it; and as the story meanders along, rambling with its characters, larger matters of love and death are brought up; too schematically for my tastes, but there you have it.
It's a decent, at times flawed script, but the superb performances of the major players help enormously; and the character development is good. Some of the parts are meatier than others, but the actors themselves cannot be blamed for this:
Don Murray is a young Everyman with a pregnant wife; he's in night school so as to become an accountant, which will better equip him to support his family. He's the "audience identification" character in what's in many ways a thankless part, but Murray breaths life into it. Jack Warden could have played his standard issue baseball loving bachelor in his sleep, but he didn't. E.G. Marshall's portrayal of a death haunted (and for good reason) book-keeper, is itself haunting, and for me, a revelation, as Marshall generally played men in control of their emotions, not in conflict with them.
Larry Blyden was fine in a small part, while Philip Abbott, whom I've always liked, played his role of the man the bachelor party was thrown for, with beauty, sincerity and an modest, non-showboating realism that made me wish he'd got better parts later in his career. Carolyn Jones made the best of her small beantick role but for the life of me I can't see why she got an Academy award nomination for her few brief scenes.
Joseph La Shelle's photography was Oscar worthy (he didn't win,--I don't know if he was even nominated). As a kind of street-bound, realistic panorama of a now vanished New York City the movie is worth viewing just for that. Not to belittle the story,--it's a good one, albeit prosaic--some of the greatest pleasures of the film are in the way it looks: the subways, the bars, whether neighborhood or the hipster kind, even the men's rooms, the staircases of older buildings. At its best, as the purely visual-spatial level, the film is a joy to behold.
The ending, the way author Chayefsky wound things up too neatly for my tastes, felt quite frankly specious, as if written for suburbanites who want to see city folk as "normal", or trying to be, rather than going their own way, so to speak, at the time an option in urban life; today, not so much, as the cities of today are, culturally, not much different from the suburbs. The lines Don Murray was given to read in his final few moments in the film felt like came from a sermon, not from the mouth of a real human being. Too bad. The movie is mostly talk, which is, when well done, fine by me, but it seemed, in those closing scenes to switch gears too quickly.
Overall, The Bachelor Party is a first rate movie with. admittedly, some issues that kept it from being truly great; and it's certainly worth watching. It does fall short, but not, in my humble opinion, nearly so far as many reviewers have said it does.