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.

A New York Times review of this film when it came out described it as 'stuffed with more sociological dressing than a Christmas goose". Made to cash in on America's fascination with films like 1953's "The Wild One" and 1955's "Blackboard Jungle", the picture devolves into a sleazy romp with Anthony Quinn as a washed up former football star reduced to conning unsuspecting victims in an attempt to make a buck and keep even bigger hoods off his back.There's a scene in the film that really got my attention in it's way of depicting how low one's lot in life can descend. A bum gathers empty wine bottles from garbage cans in a back alley and casually sips the remaining contents of those he comes across before adding them to his collection. The kicker is that he's in a hurry to finish before the 'real' derelicts come calling.Big Tom Kupfen's (Quinn) next big score involves the virtual kidnapping of a couple who if they had any street smarts at all, would have steered way clear of Tom and his questionable accomplices. In particular, knife wielding Gage Freeposter (Jay Robinson), who looked the part of a crazed lunatic who could do serious bodily harm, nevertheless came across as an incompetent boob who could scarcely manage to get out of his own way when the going got tough. He proved the point when he tried to cross his buddy Tom, and got summarily dumped out of Tom's window into an alley.There are elements of film-noir here if you consider Kathryn Grant's Honey character as the put upon femme-fatale, as her relationship with Big Tom suffers the old heave-ho whenever the more 'sophisticated' Erica London (Carol Ohmart) is on screen. She and Arthur Mitchell (Arthur Franz) are the victims of Big Tom's extortion scheme, but if you're waiting for a grand finish in the way of a Wild West showdown, you might be disappointed when Honey shifts her car into gear and puts the squeeze on her big bad beau. It's one of the more surreal endings you're apt to see in any film, and one that might have added the extra flavor to the Times' sociological dressing.

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.