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The Big Knife (1955)

Jack Palance (Actor), Ida Lupino (Actor), Robert Aldrich (Director) | Rated: NR | Format: DVD
3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews) |

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Product Details

  • Actors: Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Wendell Corey, Jean Hagen, Rod Steiger
  • Directors: Robert Aldrich
  • Writers: Clifford Odets, James Poe
  • Producers: Robert Aldrich
  • Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
  • Language: English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono)
  • Subtitles: English, Spanish, French
  • Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  • Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Rated: NR (Not Rated)
  • Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
  • DVD Release Date: October 15, 2002
  • Run Time: 111 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B00006FDAT
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #134,621 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

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  • Learn more about "The Big Knife" on IMDb

Editorial Reviews

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

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)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
"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.
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23 of 26 people found the following review helpful
Deep in the Dark 1950s March 2, 2001
Format:VHS Tape|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:VHS Tape
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
The Private Life of a Movie Star
The Big Knife, 1955 film

A famous journalist visits Charlie Castle to get the truth about his marital status. Marty was involved in a hit-and-run scandal years ago. Mrs. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Acute Observer
Grand Hollywood Guignol
Aldrich certainly practiced little restraint over his remarkable cast, and theatricality rules here, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Gary Vidmar
Yeah, but Jack's hot!
Wow, the reviews for this film are all over the map. I think it's not a great film, but it has some great moments. There are some great actors in it who do very good jobs. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Dr. Pretorius
Overwrought & Overwritten
The Big Knife is Clifford Odet's tale from the dark side of Hollywood, clumsily adapted from his stage play about a mega star yearning to break free from the the studio yoke. Read more
Published 16 months ago by James D. Long
Awful
I rarely dislike old classics, film noirs, thrillers, dramas, ect. But this flick was one of the worst. Firstly, you never warm to any of the charactors. Read more
Published 18 months ago by Rachel D. Estrada
A rare and uncompromising look inward from Hollyweird
4.3 stars

"The day you first scheme, you marry that scheme...and the scheme's children."

That line is but one of many memorable moments in this over the top,... Read more
Published on March 16, 2010 by K. Swanson
Better than today's
No matter how overdramatic, the acting blew me away. I had forgotten there were such good actors.
Published on October 14, 2009 by L. Edgar
Campy but substantial.
Ok, ok, I know, this movie is campy, "over the top." But, still, it's a damn good movie.

It's serious, well-acted and other than the fact that he's a rat because sang... Read more
Published on August 14, 2008 by Yasha Banana
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Who ever thought that Jack Palance could ever deliver an emotionally wrought performance at this stage in his career? He does just that. Read more
Published on July 9, 2007 by gobirds2
The Realist, the Philistine and the Idealist....You figure it out.
There is very much room for debate on The Big Knife. The casting of Palance and Steiger, good 'ol whinny Winters, the stage-related lack of locales, etc., etc. Read more
Published on June 13, 2007 by Aco
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