Robert Aldrich (1955)
Shown as part of the BFI’s ‘Birth of the Method: the Revolution in American Acting’, The Big Knife made me wonder about the criteria for a film’s inclusion in the season. The cast of this adaptation of Clifford Odets’ stage play (with a screenplay by James Poe) includes the likes of Rod Steiger and Shelley Winters but time spent at the Actors Studio surely doesn’t mean that an actor’s every subsequent role is a true expression of their Method training? Robert Aldrich’s film contains little evidence of a radical approach to screen characterisation. The restriction of the action, except for a couple of brief exterior sequences, to a single room; the mechanical exits and entrances; the sententious dialogue (the standout aphorism is ‘Half-idealism is peritonitis of the soul’): these all suggest that The Big Knife belongs on Broadway, where it began life in 1949, even though the story is set in Hollywood. The piece has some interest as an expression of the intensity of Clifford Odets’ hatred of the Dream Factory but the tone of his censure is sanctimonious and, with Aldrich at the helm, the whole film is continuously overwrought (with a score by Frank De Vol to match).
In spite of The Big Knife‘s unremitting excoriation, this kind of exposé of lethally pernicious Hollywood must have seemed familiar by 1955 – after Sunset Boulevard and The Bad and the Beautiful, as well as the less explicitly satirical The Barefoot Contessa and A Star is Born, during the course of the previous five years. At least the stage production of The Big Knife preceded all these. The main character is Charlie Castle, a huge star who’s sold most of his soul but who retains just enough of it (a) to be mired in guilt and (b) to want to win back his estranged wife Marion, along with his self-respect. Odets is represented most obviously here by the writer Hank Teagle, whose work is too sophisticated to have made it to the cinema screen and who’s on the point of heading back to New York – he hopes in company with Marion, to whom Hank has proposed marriage.
Jack Palance works hard as Charlie but he never seems sufficiently vulnerable. Ida Lupino offers a breathy, hyper-tense interpretation of the anxiously principled Marion, whose heart still belongs to her husband, even though her head tells her to go east with Hank – played with almost comical lack of charisma by Wesley Addy. As the villainous studio boss Stanley Shriner Hoff, Rod Steiger gives the kind of ingeniously bad performance which is beyond all but the most talented actors. It’s remarkable that the thirty-year-old Steiger is physically persuasive as a man presumably meant to be twice as old but his white-haired, shades-wearing, light-voiced (until he’s angry) Hoff is camp and thoroughly psychotic: Steiger is quite unconvincing when, for example, Hoff is boasting pompously about rubbing shoulders with kings, presidents, American military heroes. Wendell Corey’s quietness as Hoff’s sidekick Smiley Coy (sic) at least makes for a bit of impact when Coy eventually raises his voice.
Jean Hagen did a famously fine job of playing another kind of Hollywood monstrosity in Singin’ in the Rain but she’s gruesomely one-note as Connie, the vampish wife of Charlie’s hopelessly loyal minder Buddy (Paul Langton), who, a few years back, took the rap for a hit-and-run accident caused by Charlie. Much of the plot revolves around the studio’s continuing attempts to hush up what really happened that night and the threat posed by Dixie Evans, a struggling starlet who knows the truth, likes a drink, and gets more talkative when she’s had one: Shelley Winters has only the one scene but her vivid, needy Dixie is the best thing in The Big Knife. Patty Benedict, a Louella Parsons/Hedda Hopper-type columnist, threatens, when Charlie upsets her, to resume digging for dirt about the car accident but no more is seen or heard of her (not a great loss: Ilka Chase is unvarying throughout the few minutes she is on screen). Since Hoff and his cronies are already preoccupied with what Dixie Evans might reveal, Patty seems pretty superfluous. With Everett Sloane, Nick Dennis and Michael Winkelman (as the Castles’ son).
13 November 2014
