The Big Knife (1955)
Directed by Robert Aldrich

Film Review

When the call came in the mid-1930s, Clifford Odets could have been under no illusion that by accepting an invitation to work in Hollywood he would have to forego a large chunk of his artistic and political integrity in return for a generous stipend.  As it turned out, his Hollywood career was mostly undistinguished, his years of toiling within the restrictive studio system yielding few works of comparable importance to his groundbreaking, socially relevant stage work.  Odets' motive for entering the movie business was exclusively financial - to support himself and the Group Theatre that continued staging his avant-garde plays.  His most notable credits as a screenwriter include Harold Clurman's wartime drama Deadline at Dawn (1946) and Alexander Mackendrick's dark newspaper satire Sweet Smell of Success (1957). He also directed two worthwhile films - None But the Lonely Heart (1944) and The Story on Page One (1959).  Ironically, it was a film with which he had no direct personal involvement - Robert Aldrich's The Big Knife - that Odets' characteristically strident anti-capitalist voice is heard loudest.

The film was adapted from Odets' play of the same title which ran for just 109 performances on its first Broadway run in 1949.  With John Garfield in the lead role, the theatrical version of The Big Knife served up a critique of Hollywood that was shockingly bleak and savage in its depiction of the corrupting influence of wealth and celebrity.  Of the playwright's works, few are as resoundingly pessimistic and damning as this excessively grim exposé, which was no doubt strongly informed by his own bitter experiences of serving as a script whore for an industry he had every reason to despise.  James Poe's adaptation for Aldrich's film retains all of the venom and pungency of Odets' original play, but staged and shot as a tense film noir psycho-drama it acquires an even darker hue and reads like a chilling modern taken on the famous Faust legend, in which an over-ambitious actor is corrupted and inevitably destroyed by his lust for fame and the earthly riches that fame brings.

Film noir is a style that Robert Aldrich had thoroughly mastered in a film he made before this, his seductively stylish crime-thriller Kiss Me Deadly (1955).  Although this film is now almost universally considered a masterpiece of its genre, its initial release was not a commercial success and Aldrich's struggles to keep his newly founded production company (The Associates and Aldrich Company) solvent were to continue for many years.  Far from being a box office hit on Broadway, The Big Knife was not the safest stage play Aldrich could have chosen to adapt for the big screen, and sure enough it proved to be another commercial disappointment, thanks in part to the mostly negative notices the film received.  It is worth noting that the film won a Silver Lion at the 1955 Venice Film Festival and enjoys much higher regard today.  Both thematically and stylistically it rates as one of Aldrich's most experimental films, and with its uncompromising assault on the sick sewer morality of the entertainment business, it foreshadows the director's later The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968) and The Killing of Sister George (1968).

Like Clifford Odets, Robert Aldrich had had sufficient experience of working in Hollywood to witness firsthand the abuses of executive power that routinely exploited and wasted talent for crass commercial gain.  The prospect of stardom and a fat paycheque was a sufficient lure to draw obscure talent into the cultural meat-grinder that was the movie industry in its heyday, artistic integrity and political honesty sacrificed on the gilt-lined altars to the great god Capitalism.  That Aldrich shared Odets' progressive left-wing politics is evident in both his work and his life - he was barely twenty when he turned his back on his fabulously wealthy family to pursue a completely independent artistic career.  The Big Knife is more than just a stinging critique of Hollywood.  It is a wildly brazen assault on capitalism in all its forms, and what makes it such a particularly chilling act of denunciation is how incredibly relevant it still appears, more than half a century after its first airing.  No other Robert Aldrich film hacks into your conscience with such manic insistence and urgency.

With John Garfield unable to reprise the role he had created on Broadway (owing to his untimely death from a stress-caused heart attack), the lead protagonist Charlie Castle was played by Jack Palance in the film - a risky casting choice given the actor's modest acting skills and strong association with tough macho roles.  Whilst he struggles with some of his longer monologues and fails to make his character remotely sympathetic, Palance turns out to be surprisingly convincing as the fame-hungry actor imperilled by a sudden crisis of conscience on the realisation that he has sold far more than his soul to the devilish Masters of Movieland.  Palance's prize-fighter physique and implacable tough guy features are seen to crumble and wither as the fragile, broken interior comes into view.  In what is surely the highpoint of his career, the actor presents us with the starkest manifestation of what greed and ambition can do to a human soul, the detritus of compromised ideals and corrupted talent lingering accusingly like soiled rags at the bottom of a laundry basket.

Charlie Castle has made his pact with the Devil and now he is only just waking up to the consequences.  He has the two things that most people crave in abundance - fame and fortune - but he has no freedom, no autonomy.  He is in fact nothing more than a puppet, forced to dance at his master's bidding, with no influence over the hops and skips he is required to perform.  Everything of any real importance - not least the love of the only woman who meant anything to him - has gone, and all that Charlie can look forward to is another decade squandering his abilities on vacuous formulaic pap for the ignorant uneducated masses.  Here is a contemptible wreck of man, a traitor to his own ideals, and it is to the film's advantage that we are not required to pity him.  It is through his impact on those around him - particularly his estranged wife Marion and old friend Buddy -  that Charlie's tale of woe is most poignantly felt.  They see more clearly than he ever could the magnitude of his folly and sin, but even they are powerless to save him from the conscienceless fiends that have taken possession of him, body and soul.

Charlie's torment is aggravated by the fact that there is another man in his ambit against whom he can measure himself.  Wesley Addey's softly spoken Hank Teagle is an Odets-like screenwriter who has sufficient conviction and moral resilience to free himself from the golden handcuffs that shackle him to a hack career of soul-destroying Hollywood mediocrity.  Teagle's impending escape to a new life as a novelist in New York makes Charlie's predicament appear all the more hopeless.  In Hank's eyes, the trapped movie star is the saddest thing of all - a half-idealist.  He hits the nail squarely on the head (and right into Charlie's coffin) when he remarks that 'Half-idealism is the peritonitis of the soul' (an Odetsian quote that should be emblazoned across the T-shirt of every self-respecting author).  Teagle has it exactly right - there is nothing worse than a half-surrender.  Charlie has just enough artistic integrity left in his soul to recognise himself as the lousiest kind of prostitute - one who hates the job but cannot live without the greasy banknotes and sullied kudos it brings him.

As Charlie's conflicted wife Marion, the only genuinely sympathetic and morally grounded character in the film, Ida Lupino turns in a performance of exquisite poignancy.  It is through Marion, not Charlie, that the stark magnitude of the central character's degradation is fully appreciated.  This was Lupino's last great screen role, although she continued acting in minor parts for many years afterwards and enjoyed some success as a film director, remembered for her classy noir offering The Hitch-Hiker (1953).  Marion's heartfelt cries of anguish right at the end of the film, an appeal for help that will forever go unanswered, express in excruciating clarity the damage that raw capitalism can cause.  As the camera suddenly pulls up and away from her, she shrinks to the size of a mouse caught in the most wickedly conceived of traps. Marion's agony is so intense and primal that she is instantly cast as a victim of rape - her torment being a violation not of the body but of something far more sacred, the human spirit.

And can there be a more damning personification of the Bad Hollywood Supremo than Stanley Shriner Hoff, played with a sadistic relish by that histrionic heavyweight Rod Steiger?   Pitched somewhere between Christopher Marlowe's Mephistopheles and Marlon Brando's Don Carleone (although in fact based on real-life studio bosses Harry Cohn and Louis B. Mayer), the bear-like, snowy-haired Hoff becomes the focus of attention whenever he comes into view, exuding monstrous Machiavellian intent from just about every sinew in his massive frame.  Even by Steiger's standards, it is a pretty over-the-top performance (far better suited for the stage than the screen), and there's something darkly comedic in the way Hoff alternates between yelling abuse and simperingly playing on the emotions, using every tactic in the sociopath's handbook of psychological control to get his way.  Wendell Corey is no less loathsome as Hoff's sickeningly obsequious lackey, a more frighteningly banal portrayal of evil.  Looking like Hell's answer to Laurel and Hardy, Steiger and Corey form a double act of blood-freezing malignancy, poisoning the entire space they inhabit as they play their games of gentle and not-so-gentle coercion.  How pitiful Jean Hagen and Shelley Winters appear when we see them for what they are - mere minnows in the most polluted pond on the planet.

Located almost entirely in one set (the ample living room in Charlie's lavish Bel-Air residence) and with a minimal cast, The Big Knife has an unapologetically theatrical feel that is an instant turn-off for anyone expecting a more conventional kind of film drama.  The deliberate staginess is not helped by the screenwriter's reluctance to trim some of Odets' more florid and morally indignant dialogue, which makes the film appear a tad pretentious and overwrought in places.  With such a strong cast, the performances can hardly fail to be compelling, although it is hard to overlook Palance and Steiger's tendency of giving in to histrionic over-statement at the dramatic peaks in the narrative.  Odets' habit of hammering a point home like a psychotically deranged carpenter surfaces in a few eruptions of forced emotionality,  smothering the film's underlying moral themes in a soggy downpour of melodramatic excess.

If Occam's Razor had been brought to bear on the acting and the writing, The Big Knife would have had a much sharper edge and served up a far more authentically cutting commentary on the Hollywood malaise as Odets perceived it.  These failings are to a degree ameliorated by Aldrich's typically slick mise-en-scène and Ernest Laszlo's distinctively noirish cinematography, which both bring a quality of cool elegance and sustained menace to the film.   With some daring use of long takes and deep focus photography, the camera achieves the effect of imprisoning all of the characters in a crushingly confined space.  It is remarkable how unrelentingly claustrophobic the film feels.  Extreme low and high angle shots which place everyday objects in the foreground reduce the actors to the size of dolls and increasingly we see them as mere props or puppets, just part of the scenery.

As the tension slowly ratchets up to an horrific (but hardly unexpected) climax, we can hardly avoid sharing Charlie's sense of helplessness and desperation as the walls of his gilded cage gradually close in on him when the terms of his Faustian pact become unbearable.  No film has portrayed Hollywood's grubby money-obsessed underbelly with such outspoken vehemence as Aldrich's bleak melodramatic satire.  There has never been a film that has captured so vigorously the stark inhumanity of the movie-making business and those pulling the levers - Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and The Last Tycoon (1976) are all grimly insightful in their way but tame by comparison. Wielded by an energetic director with an unwavering sense of purpose, The Big Knife eviscerates any cosy preconception of Hollywood we may have had and leaves us totally appalled by the pure malignancy that lies at its core - a cancer that deserves to feel the redeeming touch of sharp cold steel.

Film Synopsis

For Charlie Castle, one of Hollywood's biggest stars, success has come at a terrible price.  In the pursuit of fame and fortune he has had to betray the ideals he once held dear, and in doing so he has lost not only his self-respect but also the love of the only woman who has meant anything to him, his wife Marion.  Disgusted by her husband's lack of integrity, to say nothing of his heavy drinking and habitual womanising, Marion has moved out of Charlie's luxury Bel-Air house and lives alone with their infant son, intending to file for divorce.  She offers Charlie one last chance at reconciliation if he refuses to renew his contract with his controlling, monomaniacal studio boss, Stanley Shriner Hoff.

The prospect of a new and better life suddenly takes hold of the disillusioned actor but he underestimates the lengths that Hoff will go to to keep him on his payroll.  Hoff and his ever-dependable right-hand man Smiley Coy know something about Charlie that could end his career, rob him of his fortune and see him put behind bars.  A few years back, the actor was involved in a hit-and-run accident which caused the death of a youngster.  It was his friend Buddy who took the rap and ended up in prison, whilst he went scot-free.  Lacking the moral fibre to cope with the disgrace if this ever came to light, Charlie has no choice but to given in to Hoff and sign a new long-term contract.  Charlie's dark secret still isn't safe, however.  Dixie Evans, an aspiring, over-talkative young actress who was with the star at the time of the accident, looks as if she is about to spill the beans that will end Charlie's career.

Hoff will do anything to protect his property and so Smiley is sent to pressurise Charlie into help in the silencing of Dixie.  Being an accomplice to murder is the one thing that Charlie cannot agree to, and so, in a rage of righteous indignation, he summons Hoff and his agent Nat to his home for what will be his final stand against the corrupting power of the Hollywood mogul.  The showdown comes too late to save Dixie, who is killed that same evening in a road accident of which Hoff is entirely blameless.  His career in ruins, his spirit broken by countless compromises and personal betrayals, Charlie is suddenly taken aback by the unexpected revelation that Marion is still devotedly attached to him.  Finally, he sees a way out of the Hell he has created for himself...