From United Artists
Directed by Robert Aldrich
Starring
Jack Palance
Ida Lupino
Wendell Corey
Rod Steiger
Shelley Winters
Jean Hagen
Everett Sloane
Wesley Addy
Ilka Chase
Paul Langton
Nick Dennis
Bill Walker
Clifford Odets' writing here reminds me a great deal of Paddy Chayefsky's writing of Network at least in that they both give the finger to the respective industries they have under inspection. Network, of course, was a scathing indictment of the television industry and The Big Knife cuts up the movie industry in little pieces. After James Poe adapted Odets' original work, he and director Robert Aldrich shopped it around to every studio in Hollywood. Unsurprisingly, everyone said no.
The exception was little United Artists who had one of the biggest hearts and, like it often did, took on the project when others said no. And bless their hearts, they usually stayed out of the way of the creative people. I'd like to list all of their productions and you'd see what fine films they've produced.
The Big Knife has always been a controversial film. Not just with the various studios but with critics and the public. Too depressing, too emotional, too angry, too extreme, too caricatured, too like a play, wrong male lead, pedestrian direction and one can only guess what else. If one could just get rid of all those toos, I might agree. It is largely like a filmed play (most of it takes place on one set), it is depressing, angry and emotional. I've known a studio head and read about countless others. I've rubbed up against some writers and agents and known columnists and as far as I'm concerned, Odets hit the bullseye. Caricatures? More like MRIs of body and souls (or soulless). Many would sell their mothers and first-borns to make a buck. They usually didn't care who they hurt along the way.
Wrong leading man? This is the one that gets my dander up. Not only is Jack Palance the perfect leading man here but he has never been better and while we're at it, ever more accessible as an actor. I think the biggest beef of the naysayers is that he is supposed to be a matinee idol and one has a hard time imagining such a thing. Actually, he has never looked as good as a younger actor than he does here. (He was a far better-looking older man, as I see it.) I have never regarded the character as a matinee idol as much as simply an actor.
As for the Aldrich criticism, he did seem like an odd choice since his specialty was more in the area of he-man adventure sagas. If his direction is pedestrian, perhaps it's due to a good script, a great troupe of actors who required little direction and one set. He could just sit in his director's chair and suck on his cigar.
The film didn't do well on its initial release and some of that may have had to do with Aldrich badmouthing Palance's looks. It must not have bothered the actor because the duo made more films together. I suspect more to the point is that Rod Steiger's mogul character hit a little too close to home for the likes of Columbia's Harry Cohn (raving lunatic), MGM's L.B. Mayer (crybaby ploys) or RKO's Howard Hughes (wearing an earpiece), all of which Steiger uses. When the boys don't like something or someone, it spreads across Hollywood faster than smog.
Palance plays Charlie Castle who is facing two, serious, immediate problems. He is a disillusioned movie star because he has sacrificed his idealism for the big bucks that his studio provides and it is time for contract renewal. He knows that the studio chieftain (who actually dislikes Charlie and the feeling is returned) will apply all his considerate pressure to get him to re-sign. Being used as leverage is a criminal cover-up for a car accident Charlie was involved in where someone was killed and an innocent party assumed the guilt and did what should have been Charlie's prison time.
The second thing bugging the actor is that his wife Marion (Ida Lupino) is planning to divorce him. She and their son already live at the couple's beach house but she seems to hang out at their Hollywood home. She obviously still loves her husband very much but is tired of his cheating. She also is insistent that if he wants her, he must not sign another contract.
Charlie is not really a bad guy nor is Marian but most of the rest of the characters range from smarmy to downright criminal. And the story, from start to finish, has them parading through the house, all wanting a pound of flesh from emotionally-torn Charlie. We have the gossip columnist (Ilka Chase), patterned on Hedda Hopper, who wants the answers... does he re-sign with the studio and what about his marriage? Charlie's agent, played by Everett Sloane, is a good guy, always trying to explain things for Charlie, but he, too, wants something... his 10%.
The worst of the crowd are a blond Rod Steiger, as the maniacal studio head, and Wendell Corey, his great white shark of an assistant, the one who actually follows through with the dirty deeds perpetuated by studios. (And all studios had men to handle the dirty work.) Charlie's defiance enrages the studio head whose volcanic eruptions make me jump in my seat, all the while watching Corey's cold, black eyes surveying the room, looking for places to hide the bodies of the betrayers.
Steiger tries every trick in the book to get Charlie to sign on the dotted line... lies, threats, ass-kissing, horrific yelling, crying, much the way all studio heads acted. If Charlie doesn't sign, Steiger threatens to ruin him. Charlie signs and hates himself for doing so and dreads telling Marion.
Jean Hagen plays the trampy wife of Charlie's manager (Paul Langton), the man who did the time for him. She visits Charlie with the intention of getting him into the sack, which, despite his many protestations, she eventually manages. I had childhood Hollywood friends with mothers like that.
Shelley Winters, like Chase and Hagen, makes a brief but important appearance as a starlet with questionable talent who was with Charlie when he had the car accident and who now wants to talk about it to hurt the studio head, whom she despises but she gets beaten up by Steiger instead. Charlie makes a promise to help her and he is not able to do so. He has let down one more person.
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| From left... Corey, Lupino, Hagen, Chase, Palance, Sloane and Steiger |
Palance and Lupino had the right to feel proud of their work here. As I said earlier, I don't think he's ever been better. Seeing him victimized is not something we saw in Palance's performances. He always did the victimizing. It is a hugely affecting, angst-ridden performance with moments that just kind of creep up on the viewer without warning. It is beautifully measured, layered and uncompromising.
Lupino turns in a similar job. She plays a strong, intelligent woman who tries to balance the love she has for her husband with his troubling ways and for staying with the studio. Regardless of her characters, this is an actress who could always deliver the goods.
While all others in the film turn in splendid performances, let's pay some extra attention to Steiger and Corey. I've never cared for either one of them. Corey belongs in the David Janssen-Fred MacMurray school of dull acting. I have no doubt why the seriously alcoholic actor never became a top star. Steiger is so over the top in most all of his performances, so intense, so enamored of his Actors Studio training that I want to not watch any film he's in. (No Way to Treat a Lady is an exception.) But I made it work here because not liking the actors who play the most despicable characters helps not liking the characters. Steiger's penchant for screaming dramatics is as perfect for the studio head as Corey's evil muteness is for his well-paid lackey.
Winters is good but she could have phoned in her part, so closely aligned it is to her. Later in the same year, she and Palance would have a better relationship in I Died a Thousand Times, a good remake of High Sierra, in which she played the part that Lupino played in the original.
When Odets' play opened on Broadway (starring John Garfield), it was his first work there in six years, having spent that time writing for the movies. Obviously the play was a distillation of those experiences. He wanted to embrace the art he found on the stage while in Hollywood but instead just found commerce and maniacs.
It is said Odets may have partially based his play on his personal and working relationship with the temperamental actress Frances Farmer. She imploded at the money-grubbers in Hollywood and their inability to care about those who worked for them. She had a car accident similar to the one alluded to in the story and Clark Gable did as well... more or less covered up by the studio. Odets wrote a play.
It is without a doubt a grueling film on everyone (cast and viewer) and while some over the years have complained about how overwrought, depressing, and shrill it is, I not only love movies about Hollywood, but I am inclined to cite this one as the best of them all. I think Charlie's story could have ended in any number of different ways than the way it did but I don't fault the film for its downbeat, rather easy-way-out ending. In fact, without the ending that is, the story just wouldn't ring quite so true.
While Aldrich did his fair share of ultimately putting done his own film and its touchy subject for those in the industry, he would do another downbeat Hollywood story with The Legend of Lylah Clare in 1968.
Special mention must be made about Frank DeVol's effective and sometimes punishing musical score.
The Big Knife is often referred to as a film noir but I see nothing that indicates that to me. I see it simply as a drama and a damned good one at that.
Have a look at the trailer (don't tense up)...
Next posting:
The gay actor who made
only eight movies
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