The Big Knife **** (1955, Jack Palance, Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters, Ida Lupino, Wendell Corey, Jean Hagen, Everett Sloan, Ilka Chase) – Classic Movie Review 3405

Producer-director Robert Aldrich gets his big knife out to stab Tinseltown in the back. He fancies – and really relishes – the idea of biting the hand that feeds him in this sly and superlative 1955 film noir portrait of amoral Hollywood folk.

Jack Palance is ideal as successful Hollywood movie star Charles Castle, who has picked screen success instead of making art. But he finds himself on the slippery slope, pressured by his studio boss and manipulated into a scandalous cover-up to protect his career.

Palance gives one of his best performances but, even so, he is still upstaged by a barnstorming Rod Steiger as Stanley Shriner Hoff, the scary, sadistic, power-crazed studio boss, in a character evidently based on two famous movie mogul monsters, MGM’s Louis B Mayer and Columbia’s Harry Cohn.

James Poe’s incisive screenplay is based on Clifford Odets’s Broadway play, which easily breathes oxygen into these deliberately familiar archetypes and scandals. The cover-up is supposedly based on a real-life incident involving a young John Huston, which Mayer apparently paid gossip columnist Louella Parsons a large sum of money not to disclose in her newspaper column.

Cohn didn’t see the funny side of it and took it as a personal insult. He retaliated by firing Aldrich half way through filming The Garment Jungle (1957) for Columbia when he realised that this was the director who made The Big Knife.

Undeterred, this cult movie proved the forerunner of Aldrich’s own 1962 classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Also in the cast are Everett Sloan, Ilka Chase, Wesley Addy, Paul Langton, Nick Dennis, Bill Walker, Mel Welles, Robert Sherman and Strother Martin.

Independently produced by the director’s company Associates and Aldrich, it was turned down by all the major studios in Hollywood but found support at United Artists. Though Aldrich blamed Palance for the film’s box office failure, saying he didn’t have the right leading man looks, they worked together several times again, starting with Attack! in 1956.

Supposedly the only movie to have a screen credit for a company that supplied upholstered furniture!

John Garfield starred as Charles Castle in the original Broadway production of The Big Knife, which ran for 109 performances at the National Theatre from February 24 – May 28 1949, directed by Lee Strasberg. Garfield was slated for the film but died in 1952 of a heart attack. Palance stepped in when Burt Lancaster turned down the role.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3405

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