Out In The 1950s Hollywood Night-Jack Palance’s The Big Knife

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

DVD Review

The Big Knife, starring Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Rod Steiger, from a play by Clifford Odets, 1955

Hollywood has apparently always subscribed to the notion that there is no such thing as bad publicity and the film under review, The Big Knife, which derides the old time pre-1950s studio system and pokes into the seamy, steamy side of the business is a case in point. That studio system, essentially a form of indentured servitude, meant that a actor signed to a studio was committed to that studio for the duration whatever other offers from other sources and offer to do non-studio material might come along. Needless to say the actors, especially the rising star actors, got short shrift under that arrangement and eventually that system was scraped but at the time period in the film it was in full sway.

The film based on a play by Clifford Odets (more on him later) portrays a very successful Hollywood actor Charlie Castle (Jack Palance) who is pushed this way and that by the powers that be in Hollywood under the old studio system. The powers that be, or rather the power that be, is one Sam Hoff (Rod Steiger) based on maybe seven different real Hollywood tyrannical bosses in the old days and who come hell or high water was intent on keeping the system intact. Charlie nevertheless tried to push back goaded by his wife, Marion (Ida Lupino), who longs for Charlie to go back to his old idealistic self and stop making ugly films that only benefit the bottom line, Hoff’s bottom line. The tension between Charlie and Hoff, between Charlie (a sometime philander as well as semi-idealist) and Marion, and between Charlie and his old time sense of himself that he still was a creative artist and not a hack drive the major action of the film. Of course as such uneven struggles go, the struggle between a weak semi-idealist artist and a profit- driven corporation who hold a career-threatening secret about the man can only end one way. Charlie in the end, Charlie Castle the man of clay, must take the fall, and he does.

So much for the rough plot-line of this melodrama, and whatever its pretensions that is the way the film plays out. What is more interesting is are the characters around the main characters. Apparently in putting this one together every possible stereotype was thrown in the pot from the pampered but proud leading actor to the loyal if distraught Hollywood wife and everything else in between. That in between includes that aforementioned raging studio boss, the yes-man flak man who will spin anything the boss tells him to spin, a groveling agent (Charlie’s). a loyal friend, a disloyal friend’s wife who is out strictly for kicks, kicks with whomever she eyes, a starlet who will do anything for success and a gentile writer who has had it with Hollywood and wants to go back to New York to write the great American novel ( a tip to Odets himself). That obvious mix along with plenty of over the top melodramatic moments at the end make this gentle-hard look at Hollywood’s insides less than it could have been.

A special word on Clifford Odets. There is plenty of talk in the film about lost idealists and idealism, about selling out the values of lost and hungry youth to the monster Hollywood. Odets when he wrote this thing could have used own checkered past as a guide-stone. Odets had no problem naming names of Communists that he knew before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) when they called him up. A snitch, no question. Others, remember the Hollywood Ten, told that committee to go to hell. So, yes, there is a certain sense in which this storyline is the storyline of Odets shabby little later life. Take warning.