Your IP has been blocked. Please perform the action below to regain access.
75.126.130.58-
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
-
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.
Rating: 
-
The horror!
We are possibly, in front of the bleakest of all the Noir films ever made. Aldrich surrounded this magnificent work of struggling and anguishing atmosphere, and bringing back to the antipodes of a true Greek tragedy, where the hero is absent.
An actor in abrupt slope due alcoholism does not want to renew his contract. This problem has estranged from his wife. His producer Stanley Hoff is in absolute disagreement with that decision. And because of this after having exposed all the arguments, decides to blackmail him, under the threat of denounce arguing he killed a pedestrian in drunkenness state in presence of Dixie.
But Stanley is very suspicious and to avoid any possibility of jeopardy he eliminates her. This violent death and his wife's final departure joined the fact she will stay with Hank Teagle after the divorce materializes is the last push for this tormented and defenceless human being.
Aldrich' s extreme angles and short lenses distort even more the perspectives of Charlie' s world , externalizing with visible morbidity Charlie' s frenzy.
Aldrich with this film and Kiss me deadly belongs to the reduced Pantheon of the Noir Film `s Godfathers.
Rating: -
Many-layered classic
Years later, another look at The Big Knife. Due respect to other reviewers, but "blacklist" analogies never occurred to me when first viewed in 1956... or anytime after, nor are they necessary to an appreciation of the film. The cast alone, even for those possibly indifferent to the younger Jack Palance, make this something to see: Ida Lupino, Wendell Corey, Everett Sloane, Jean Hagen, Shelley Winters, Ilka Chase, and the absolutely, quintessential Rod Steiger: exuberantly, enthusiastically, maniacally overacting as the LBMayer/HarryCohn/JackWarner producer. Steiger farcically, outrageously, climbs the curtains and gnaws the rugs but is great fun to watch. A mid-fifties polemic upon the Big Bad Castrating Studio System, featuring some of the choicest Odets rococo, Steiger makes it seem also a blast at Actors Studio and The Method. Alas, the ending is unbearably, incredibly, insupportably, contextually wrong and amateurishly executed, too horrible even to be camp,as a nattering moralist is trotted center stage to prate nobly while a---wait for it!--yes, a Demillian Celestial Chorus oohs and ums.
Rating: 
-
Anguished performance by the excellent Mr Palance
Very clearly a filmed version of Clifford Odets' stage play with the action confined almost exclusively to the lounge room of the Bel Air mansion of protaganist Charlie Castles, this is very much an over the top actor's delight with Mr Steiger and Mr Palance letting fly in the best stage histrionics. Fun to watch, with rich language, it sort of works but doesn't really take off and could have done with some judicious editing. More a curio piece than classic, it is nevertheless one to own and to revisit.
Rating: -
Hollywood From the Bottom Up
In just one of the trenchant lines in this superbly written film, Shelley Winters's character, a pathetic starlet/whore, tells the film's tortured protagonist (Palance), "You don't see these people the way I do, from the bottom." Unlike the preponderance of other reviewers here, I love Rod Steiger's performance as studio chief Stanley Shriner Hoff. Steiger has an incredible dynamic range-one critic called him a cross between a cobra and a bull. I've read Odets' play, and the film is a remarkably faithfull adaptation. Robert Aldrich's films could often be coarse and catered to an audience of jaded working class men looking for action, but here he comes through with one of his best films.
