Product Description

Academy Award® winners* Jack Palance, Rod Steiger and Shelley Winters deliver knockout performances in this vicious "poison-pen letter to the movie business" (American Cinematheque)that's an extreme close-up of greed, lust and murder! Hollywood superstar Charlie Castle (Palance) has it all except a way out. When he tries to leave show business, his tyrannical studio boss Stanley Hoff (Steiger) blackmails him with a lethal, covered-up secret that could land him in jail. A loose-lipped starlet (Winters) also knows too much, and when she starts talking, Hoff plans murder. Now Charlie is more cornered than everon the brink of losing his wealth, his power and his soul. *Palance: Supporting Actor, City Slickers (1991); Steiger: Actor, In the Heat of the Night (1967); Winters: Supporting Actress, A Patch of Blue (1965), Supporting Actress, The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30069 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-10-15
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 114 minutes

Amazon.com
After 1952's The Bad and the Beautiful skewered Hollywood with a scathing attempt at self-analysis, The Big Knife (1955) finished the job of exposing the slimy underbelly of the studio system. This high-gloss noir, cynical to the bone and altogether hysterical in its potboiler theatrics, is a deliriously entertaining mid-'50s melodrama, adapted from the play by Clifford Odets (who brought a similar brand of vitriol to Sweet Smell of Success) and starring Jack Palance in a role that transcended his trademark villainy. Palance is quite effective as rising star Charlie Castle, whose continued ascension in Hollywood depends on his willingness to renew a contract with studio bully Stanley Hoff (Rod Steiger), who treats Charlie like an indentured servant and, even worse, has plenty of dirt to hold against Charlie if he doesn't cooperate.

Trapped between stardom and a desperate desire to reconcile with his neglected wife (Ida Lupino), Charlie's facing a no-win scenario, haunted by the indiscretions of his past. Palance's overwrought performance is perfectly keyed to director Robert Aldrich's typically histrionic approach; he's eclipsed only by Steiger, whose Method madness has rarely been as outrageous as this (his character was partially based on studio honcho Jack Warner). Set primarily in the well-appointed den of Charlie's Bel-Air manse, The Big Knife is stagy but stylish, with Charlie's home taking on the appearance of a gilded cage as his predicament intensifies. Add a stellar supporting cast, and you've got film noir at its finest--dark souls baking in the California sun. --Jeff Shannon

Customer Reviews

Deep in the Dark 1950s
For anyone like myself who has a fondness for the darker 1950s productions like Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success or Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, this movie--which might well have been called Faust in Bel Air--is an absolute must. Robert Aldrich was a perfect director for this kind of material, although The Big Knife--most of whose action takes place on a single set--is less kinetic than his earlier Kiss Me Deadly. Two great movies, Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard and George Cukor's A Star Is Born, had already wickedly dissected the less glamorous side of life in the movie industry, but The Big Knife not only presents a far gloomier view of Hollywood, but makes the backstage intrigues of the motion picture capital into a metaphor for the rampant political paranoia of Cold War era America. The movie is based on a 1949 play by Clifford Odets--who had himself named names to HUAC in order to continue working in the movies--about an actor being blackmailed by a Mephistophelean producer, but when Aldrich and James Poe transferred the drama into the context of the middle 1950s, no halfway knowledgeable viewer could have missed the analogy to the blacklist--particularly since the movie depicts the producer, brilliantly played by Rod Steiger, as a vicious reactionary in the mold of L.B. Mayer who worships General Douglas MacArthur. In addition, The Big Knife may also be seen as a reply to Kazan's On the Waterfront, which glorified an informer--and tacitly rationalized the director's own collaboration with HUAC--by showing its hero choosing to commit suicide rather than capitulate to the evil Steiger. As the other reviews note, the performances are all remarkable, but I was especially impressed by Shelley Winters as a would-be starlet. She only has one extended scene, but that alone is more than worth the price of the video, which is ridiculously low-priced.

Red Neon Lights and Drunken Blackbirds
The corn is as high as a movie star's eye in the yammer-yammer-yammer of Clifford Odets's Hollywood play THE BIG KNIFE, and Robert Aldrich's bristling film version can't do much to open up the talkfest. But there's some fascinating stuff here. For starters, the model for Jack Palance's cornered movie star is obviously John Garfield, but Odets seems to use the character as a mouthpiece for why he himself had failed to live up to his spectacular beginnings on Broadway. The country of those who have sold out is familiar territory to Odets, and scattered in lots of very purple prose lie nuggets of sharply-observed writing. The players know the terrain, too, and they tear into their roles with gusto. Palance, Ida Lupino, and Miss Shelley Winters (what's with her billing here?) are all marvelous, and Rod Steiger is jawdroppingly good. This is the 50's, remember, when George Stevens (held up here as a model of "meaningful" filmmaking) gave us the ultra-waspy Millie Perkins as Anne Frank, which makes Steiger's Jewish inflections and rhythms in an exceedingly unsympathetic role a risky, but very rewarding, choice. (Hollywood had generally taken the guts and the ethnicity out of Odets, as per the very denatured film of GOLDEN BOY.) When Steiger gets into gear, you can't take your eyes off him. Special kudoes, too, to Jean Hagen. Those who only remember her in SINGIN' IN THE RAIN are in for a shock. Playing a drunken, masochistic adulteress, she manages to be simultaneously childlike, sexy, pathetic and chilling. Good support from dependables like Ilka Chase, Wesley Addy, and Wendell Corey, too. Really worth a look.

Not a Very Cinematic Adaptation. Histrionic but Powerful Performances.
"The Big Knife" is based on the Clifford Odets play of the same name, adapted for the screen by James Poe and directed by Robert Aldrich. The film is not very cinematic. It is essentially a play that has been filmed. It takes place almost exclusively on one set -a Bel Air living room, the dialogue is mannered, and the performances are often histrionic. This is Clifford Odets, and it's melodrama. The dialogue tends to purple but is certainly intriguing. It's not a natural adaptation of Odets, like 1952's "Clash By Night", which was transformed into a real work of cinema by director Fritz Lang. The actors sometimes deliver Odets' heavy dialogue naturally and casually; other times they go over the top. Moments of high drama are punctuated by drum rolls. Sometimes it seems that director Robert Aldrich should have interpreted the play more cinematically or more realistically for the silver screen, but I suppose that is a matter of taste. "The Big Knife" succeeds on the strength of its performances, which are almost universally excellent.

"Charlie Castle is a man who sold out his dreams, but he can't forget them." Charlie (Jack Palance) is a movie star who made it big under contract to Hoff Federated studios, owned by unscrupulous megalomaniac Stanley Hoff (Rod Steiger). Charlie's wife Marion (Ida Lupino) has threatened to leave him should he renew his contract with Hoff. She can't stand the way that inane movies and virtual imprisonment have turned her once-idealistic husband into a spiritless toady. But Charlie isn't free to do as he pleases, because Hoff holds incriminating information over him. Charlie was in a drunken car accident, for which a friend and studio employee took the blame. And the only other witness to the accident, aspiring young actress Dixie Evans (Shelley Winters), has developed the habit of shooting her mouth off about it.

Most of "The Big Knife" is conversation, so we get to know these characters well. Jack Palance gives a powerhouse performance and is usually able to make the overwrought dialogue believable. Ida Lupino is striking as his wife as well. The tyrannical Stanley Hoff is forceful but over-the-top. He's so thoroughly evil and grand in his speech that he isn't very credible. He's played as if he were on stage, which I don't think was wise. That doesn't go unnoticed by the writers or characters, though. Charlie asks Stanley point blank if he's ever been told that "the embroidery of your speech was completely out of proportion to anything you had to say!?" That line made me laugh. Once you get past the histrionics, "The Big Knife" is a well-articulated, if theatrical, story of an idealist -Charlie, a man who sold out and never looked back -Hoff's assistant Smiley Coy, played perfectly by Wendell Corey, and a person who never met an ideal -Stanley Hoff. We get a fun, cynical take on the players of Hollywood's golden era as well.

The DVD (MGM 2002): This print of the film has not been restored. Most of the flaws are minor scratches, but the picture flickers briefly and shows a big black spot about 1 hour and 23 minutes into the film. The only bonus feature is a theatrical trailer (2 ½ minutes). Subtitles are available in English, French, and Spanish.