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.
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