User Reviews

Robert Aldrich's "The Big Knife" is essentially a blistering attack on the old Hollywood studio system but is also a sympathetic account of the circumstances which lead to a successful movie star's complete mental and emotional breakdown. This tragic story of blackmail, lost ideals and the gross abuse of power features a group of predominantly unpleasant characters whose moral standards are deplorably low and who ultimately suffer as a consequence of their involvement in a cesspit of corruption and dubious practices.

Actor Charlie Castle (Jack Palance) is reluctant to sign a new contract he's been offered by studio boss Stanley Shriner Hoff (Rod Steiger) because of his wife's opposition and also because he no longer wishes to be associated with the successful but poor quality movies he's been involved with in the past. Hoff is a particularly ruthless character who isn't prepared to let one of his studio's top money earners leave without a struggle.

Some time previously, Charlie had been involved in a hit and run accident in which a child was killed. The studio arranged a cover up and press agent Buddy Bliss (Paul Langton) was the fall guy who was made to confess and then serve a ten month prison sentence.

Inevitably Hoff puts pressure on Charlie and threatens to expose the truth about the car accident if he doesn't cooperate. Charlie feels that he has no choice and signs the contract. When he phones his estranged wife Marion (Ida Lupino) and tells her what he's done, she hangs up on him. Marion had initially left Charlie because of his womanising and drinking but had said that she'd consider a reconciliation if he rejected the new contract. Since leaving Charlie, she'd also started a new relationship with one of their oldest friends Hank Teagle (Wesley Addy). Hank had proposed to her but she hadn't accepted.

One night after drinking heavily to assuage his anguish over what had happened, Charlie is visited by Buddy's alcoholic wife Connie (Jean Hagen). She makes it clear that she too knows about his culpability regarding the accident and the circumstances which led to her husband going to prison. The despairing Charlie decides to go upstairs to bed and Connie follows.

Another problem arises when it comes to light that a studio starlet called Dixie Evans (Shelley Winters) who was in the car with Charlie on the night of the accident, has been talking indiscreetly about the incident to anyone who'll listen. Charlie finds that she's been talking to take revenge on the studio that has used her to entertain exhibitors instead of giving her work as an actress.

Studio fixer Smiley Coy (Wendell Corey) responds to the threat posed by Dixie by trying to conscript Charlie into an arrangement to murder her by using "doctored gin" and when Charlie refuses he then suggests that Charlie should marry her. Fortunately, neither of these solutions is required as the inebriated starlet is conveniently run over by a bus in a genuine accident. Despite this, Charlie's experiences take a heavy toll on him and ultimately become totally unbearable.

The predicament that Charlie found himself in made him tormented as he felt threatened from all directions and cornered into a position from which there was no way out that offered him any genuine happiness for the future. Being blackmailed by his powerful studio boss was bad enough but the ongoing threat of having the truth about the hit and run incident being carelessly exposed by the unstable Connie or Dixie made matters worse as did the threat posed by a gossip columnist who promised to revisit the story in the press if he refused to give her some tittle tattle about the state of his marriage.

Marion believed she inhabited to moral high ground in urging him to stand by his ideals at all costs but didn't think it wrong to blackmail him by saying that any reconciliation would be dependent on him not signing the contract. Her ideals also didn't prevent her from starting a new relationship with an old mutual friend who was also claimed to be a man of high ideals! "The Big Knife" was based on the successful play of the same name by Clifford Odets and does look stagy but this quality also gives the action an appropriately claustrophobic atmosphere. The use of numerous low and high angle shots also reinforces visually the feelings of turmoil and helplessness that Charlie experiences. This is a well directed movie with strong performances but it's probably the rather depressing story which prevented it from being a greater success commercially.

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.

Drama with Jack Palance as a big movie star in big trouble. He killed a child in a hit-run accident and someone or someones are threatening to spill the beans.

We have a top-rated cast here. Rod Steiger steals the show as a movie studio mogul out to destroy Palance if he doesn't sign that 7 year deal.

Looks wise, Palance has never appeared better. Kudos to the make-up artist who actually made the guy look good looking here. As his wife, Ida Lupino is not dominant in the film. There lacks that vicious quality which made her a star in so many other films. Nonetheless, she turns in an adequate performance as the conflicted wife.

Jean Hagen and Shelley Winters portray two bimbos who are really flying high. Wendell Corey and Ilka Chase, the latter as a Hedda Hopper type round out the cast.

Palance is quite conflicted here. He is almost a Shakespeare-like tragedy. We know that he is contemplating suicide because we see that near famous James Mason like walk in "A Star is Born," the year before. Geraldine Page would repeat that phenomenon in 1978's "Interiors."

Ironically, Palance starred with Winters in "I Died A Thousand Times" in 1955. The latter was a remake of the Ida Lupino vehicle "High Sierra" with Humphrey Bogart. What a grand reunion here for all!