The Big Knife (1955)

The Big Knife. [Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer]. DVD. Santa Monica: MGM Home Entertainment, 2002. Produced and directed by Robert Aldrich. Originally produced and released as a motion picture by in 1955.  Based on the stage play by Clifford Odets. Adapted for the screen by James Poe.

   Performers: Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Wendell Corey, Jean Hagen, Rod Steiger, Ilka Chase, Everett Sloane, Shelley Winters, Wesley Addy. Summary: Hollywood actor Charles Castle is pressured by his studio boss into signing a seven-year contract and participating in a criminal cover-up to protect his valuable career.

“ … ideals?  nowadays? … a lost crusade”

The Big Knife is director Robert Aldrich’s paean to the dark side of the motion picture industry, a kind of mid-Fifties coda to the films which earlier in the decade ripped back the curtain and exposed the seamy side of Hollywood and the attendant human costs it extracts, especially from those at the lower end of the power spectrum [1].

Everything about TBK is over-the-top, gloriously so: characters, acting, script, music. The one exception is the rather flat, nondescript lighting, which would undermine any case to be made that Knife is film noir. Indeed TBK is little more than a filmed play: talky, stagey, a little long perhaps, and with more than a touch of the soap opera in its aesthetic DNA. But what soap opera!

The barbed dialogue flows as effortlessly as the alcohol that everyone laps up like catnip. With some of the best lines this side of Sunset Boulevard, the script veritably drips with an acidy post-modern cynicism, and it's no surprise that Knife takes the same moral position as the earlier film and has similar archetypal characters. And not to put too fine a point on the political angle, it nonetheless has a blacklist overlay, ubiquitously lurking as heavy background. This was, after all, the ever-paranoic Fifties, when the recriminations and counter-recriminations flew fast and furious. Thus the film might be read as a Cold War parable. Then again, maybe not. Whatever its message, Knife is just juicily entertaining.

The vintage mid-century cast is a delight. The men are fine, especially a scenery-chewing Rod Steiger who plays a ruthless studio head. Kudos too to Wendell Corey in a chillingly underplayed turn as a company lawyer who’ll stoop to any means, legal or otherwise, to protect the studio. And Palance of course is wonderful in a very atypical Jack Palance type of role.

But it’s the ladies that do the real standout acting. Ida Lupino plays a virtuous wife who’s, finally, interesting and gives a little more shading to a role that usually degenerates into self-pitying caricature. And we can't forget Ilka Chase as a nasty gossip columnist. Shelly Winters is a little less effective portraying a quintessentially Shelly Winters character. Her over-acting just seems a little, well, overdone. Best of all is Jean Hagen in an all too brief appearance as a deliciously predatory femme fatale, all the better to tempt Charlie Hastings (Palance). She radiates a relentless, malevolent sex appeal that makes Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson from Double Indemnity look like a wallflower.

[1] The triumvirate of films from ca. 1950 were Sunset Blvd., The Bad and the Beautiful, and In a Lonely Place.  The trend continued, albeit somewhat more benignly, with films like Singin’ in the Rain and A Star is Born. The idea found echoes a decade or so later, in more camp fashion, in movies like Valley of the Dolls, Carpetbaggers, and The Oscar. Then the movies gave the Hollywood-at-its-dirtiest trope a rest.