The Big Knife

source: The Big Knife

Charles Castle (Jack Palance) is a successful top Hollywood actor. His wife Marion (Ida Lupino) is about to leave him. She is idealistic and wants him to stop making trash movies. He tries to do what she wants and refuses to renew his contract angering studio boss Stanley Shriner Hoff (Rod Steiger). Smiley Coy had covered up Castle's hit and run and Hoff uses the incident to blackmail him to sign a new 7 year contract. Charles struggles as his dark secret comes back to haunt him when hungry actress Dixie Evans (Shelley Winters) threatens to reveal it. It's Hollywood at its sleaziest. I just have a problem with Jack Palance as the 'Artist'. He is a stiff actor with a limited range and can't convince me otherwise. He's great at what he does but I can't buy him as the tortured artist. It just takes me out of the movie. Shelley Winters is terrific but otherwise the movie is filled with overacting.

Unless you understand that The Big Knife was Clifford Odets's one finger salute to Hollywood and its mores, you will not understand the film at all. Odets after some bad times in tinseltown went back to his first love which was the theater and wrote this play which ran for 109 performances in the 1949 season on Broadway. In the lead roles of actor Charlie Castle and producer Marcus Hoff, Odets cast a couple of guys who were having difficulty finding employment in Hollywood at that time as well, kindred spirits from the Group Theater back in the day, John Garfield and J. Edward Bromberg. Garfield who certainly could bring his own life into the part plays Odets himself who had as tempestuous personal life as his creation Charlie Castle. He feels starved creatively because of the junk he's been doing in Hollywood, not the stuff of social significance that Odets did back Group Theater days. Jack Palance plays Castle in the film and while he does justice to the part I only wish John Garfield had lived to do the screen version of what he created. He had an unceasing rebellion against Warner Brothers for the stereotypical tough guys parts he was being cast in. But just after he broke free came the blacklist. Rod Steiger is malevolence itself as the producer whom I believe was based on Louis B. Mayer. Odets dealt with him through his then wife Luise Rainer over at MGM. Mayer was not liked even by his fellow studio moguls and he had been toppled in a studio power play at MGM a few years earlier. Had he still been in charge at MGM, I'm willing to bet The Big Knife might never have been made even as an independent film with a United Artists release. Director Robert Aldrich filled out the rest of the cast with familiar Hollywood names like Ida Lupino as Palance's estranged wife, Everett Sloane as his long suffering agent, Wendell Corey in a role that has to be modeled on MGM's fixer who knew where all the bodies were buried Eddie Mannix, Shelley Winters as the bimbo like starlet who can put an end to Palance's career and Ilka Chase as a Hedda Hopper like columnist who is the self appointed keeper of the Hollywood morals. Chase's scenes are at the beginning of the film and she really has the columnist character dead on. On stage the entire play is set in the living room of the Palance/Lupino Hollywood style mansion. Like the house in Long Day's Journey Into Night, the opulent living room becomes a character itself, showing the velvet and comfortable trap that Palance is in and why he just can't give up all this comfort, even for the art that used to motivate him. Odets might have done better had someone else a little more dispassionate had written this based on his memoirs. The Big Knife gets a little too personal at times. And it never quite loses the stage origin even with a few scenes away from the house. But the acting his first rate from a first rate cast. I'd watch The Big Knife as a look into the mind of Clifford Odets.

I've tried to watch this film 3 or 4 times, but I just can't get past the fact that everything about it is just awful. I'm sure it was a courageous move by somebody to cast Jack Palance as the protagonist, but there is not one single fiber of my being that believes that he could act at all, much less act against type. Yes, I understand that Clifford Odets was a brilliant author, but it's not evident here. This odd and forced mish-mash of 50's hipster dialog seems to obfuscate any genuine meaning, which explains why none of the actors, even the good ones (Steiger, Ida Lupino, Shelly Winters, Everett Sloane) seems to know how to deliver their lines - it's as though they don't understand the meaning of what they are saying. And in the meantime, Wendell Corey and Palance stage a terrific contest to see who can be more stone-faced. The direction is amateurish and completely overwrought. The physical interaction between the characters is as stilted as the dialog. And can we discuss that hideous set? It's so busy, ugly and contrived that it adds to the robotic, disconnected quality of the characters, the dialog and the portrayals. This film seems to suck the energy right out of me. It looks like everybody took an overdose of Valium each morning when they arrived on the set. It takes a pretty lousy movie to make Rod Steiger and Shelly Winters look bad, but this one succeeds. I can see that it might have been effective as a play on or off Broadway, where intellectuals and beats could have congratulated themselves for appreciating the power of the plot and the artsy flourishes of the pseudo-hip dialog.

A sadly inferior precursor to "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" this film drags on and on, occasionally reviving your interest only to put you through more selfindulgent maundering and obvious but patently overdone plot points. It may list as 111 minutes but feels like three hours of painfully wasted time.

The Big Knife is a mostly good adaptation of a Clifford Odets play about a Hollywood actor who's being blackmailed into studio servitude while trying to patch up his failing marriage. This is a movie for which the word powerful was truly invented. Most of the film takes place on one set and places heavy emphasis on speeches from the individual characters for its really riveting moments (as I would expect from a stage play), but those moments definitely get across. The whole cast is good, but Jack Palance in a nuanced and fiery performance as the actor Charlie Castle, and Rod Steiger, giving a deeply felt and passionate realization of the corrupt studio boss are nothing short of superb. The screenplay is full of smart, incisive, biting dialogue as well. Except for a melodramatic turn at the end, that, for me, takes a lot of the edge off the story, this is a well-acted film that is solid, though not spectacular, entertainment. 3*** out of 4

Cliff Odets was one of the finest American playwrights of the 20th century and several of his plays have been adapted for the screen with varying results. This is one of the best. Odets made his name with the Group Theatre in the mid thirties where one of the actors was Jules Garfinckle. Hollywood knocked that out of him and he became John Garfield, in many ways the acting personification of Odets writing, raw, virile, coiled spring contained energy. So it was fitting that when Odets wrote a new play in 1949 Garfield played the lead on Broadway. Alas, I didn't see it but I can imagine how writer and actor combined perfectly. When Robert Aldrich came to make the film he tapped Jack Palance - an actor he worked with in back-to-back productions, this one and 'Attack' - for the Garfield role, a good choice as it's difficult to think of another actor of the time, with the possible exception of Charles Bronson who was still relatively unknown, who could bring the energy and self-disgust to the part of the stage actor who'd 'sold out' to Hollywood (for actor read writer, Odets himself deserted Broadway for Hollywood and lived to regret it) and can't walk away without paying the price in scandal. Aldrich surrounded Palance with an almost perfect cast. Ida Lupino was seldom better as Marion, the wife in love with her husband's integrity as much as with the man himself, Wendell Corey, never much more than a Johnny-One-Note actor lucked into a part - press agent Smiley Coy - that called for that very one note in his repertoire, Jean Hagan and Shelley Winters handled the Hollywood 'tramps' as well as any of their contemporaries would have done and Rod Steiger was nothing if not memorable as Stanley Shriner Hoff an amalgam of any movie moguls you care to think of from Harry Cohn to Louis B. Mayer. It's a great script laced with highly quotable lines and full of that Odets pizzaz.

One of the 10 best of '55 with sparks flying between Palance & Steiger. Subtle performance by Ms. Ida Lupino and intensity personified by J. Palance. Rod Steiger with white hair and hearing aid is pretty scary. Written by Clifford Odets, this realistic Hollywood tale cuts no corners and does not see out. An 8 out of 10. Best performance = Rod Steiger. Too grim for some. Beautiful B/W cinematography and terrific script and the entire cast is deliberate and impassioned. I don't believe it was nominated for anything, but should have been. I'm not sure if this is on video or DVD, but check it out!

This 1955 film was adapted from a play by Clifford Odets and James Poe. It is a dark study of the seedier side of Hollywood of it's time. Making all involved not such pleasant people. It centers around a top movie star, Charlie Castle (played brilliantly by Jack Palance) who wants out of the movie limelight in order to move on to better high grade films. But, the movie studios are not that eager to lose their sexy star. Most of the film is about Charlie and his struggle to come out ahead. With the studio boss (one of Rod Steiger's better roles), his wife (the wonderful Ida Lupino in another terrific performance); the sleezy studio promo man (Wendell Corey in a delicious underplayed role); and the agent (one of Everett Sloane's best performances). Also rounding out this stellar cast are Jean Hagen, as the wife of Charlie's best friend, and a gal out to get Charlie in bed, and Shelly Winters, who does well as a sort of dumb blonde being used by the studio to entertain executives. Thinking this is the way to become a movie star. Robert Aldrich directed this classic with a deft touch and excellent interplay with his cast. A simple set allows the actors to do their work without the Hollywood tinsel. Made in black and white, this is drama at its best and the stars at their best. See this amazing film if you're an actor. It will teach you much.

A truly memorable film with tough and rugged, but hardly handsome, Jack Palance as Charlie Castle playing of all people an actor who's always playing matinée Idols and great lovers. As Charlie's boss and studio owner Stanley Hoff,Rod Steiger, says of him throughout the film :"He makes all the women of America heart's swoon". "The Big Knife" is worth the price of admission just to see how and if director Robert Aldrich can pull it off and make the film both entertaining and believable. You see Charlie is getting tired of playing all those roles over the years as a heart throb to the women of America and wants to get out of his contract with the Hoff Studios and go independent; That was a big thing for actors back in the 1950's. Charlie wan't to do films that are worthy of his extraordinary talents as a serious and Shakespearian actor. It's that Charlie's off the wall and possessive boss Stanley Hoff, the Big Knife, doesn't want his meal ticket to leave and take his fans with him! So Stanley rolls out the heavy artillery and plays his trump card. It seems that Charlie has a dark secret that the studio has been covering up for years and if Charlie leaves that secret won't be a secret any more! Get It Charlie! The film "The Big Knife" can really be described as one of the most multi storied soap operas ever put on film with the audience needing score cards just to keep up with the story and even then they'll get lost. Whoever coined the phrase "Seeing is believing" must have based it on the the incredible performance of Rod Steiger's Stanley Hoff which goes from a Saturday Night Live impersonation shtick of a big Hollywood producer to an Oscar winning interpretation of Hamlet all at the same time! It's really incredible to watch and believe what your seeing in Steiger's over the top performance. And Jack Palance, determined not to be shown up his co-star, really did pull it off in him Playing a role so out of character and yet evoking real and genuine sympathy from the audience that he should have, but didn't, won the 1955 Academy Award for best actor hands down! As the tortured soul with a dark past who only wanted to do Art Films and get away from playing debonair and charming movie parts that make women go ape all over him. In the end of the film when Palance went all out, or was it underwater, in the final few minutes of the movie he was so convincing that I just couldn't keep the tears from rolling down my cheeks! No matter how much people criticize Robert Aldrich's "The Big Knife" and with good justification this is one movie where you can really say that the acting actually overwhelmed the script!