The Big Knife (1955)

Film: The Big Knife (1955)

Stars: Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Wendell Corey, Jean Hagen, Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters, Everett Sloane

Director: Robert Aldrich

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

Film noir in the mid-to-late 1950's, in my opinion, gets a bum rap.  Yes, at this point we are seeing less of the biggest names in show business doing the genre (not like in the 1940's when stars like Rita Hayworth, Gene Tierney, & Barbara Stanwyck were regularly appearing in the genre), but you still get really good movies like Odds Against Tomorrow, The Wrong Man, and perhaps the greatest film noir of them all (my opinion changes depending on the day on who deserves that title) Touch of Evil.  In 1955, Robert Aldrich, most well-known today as the guy who dealt with Bette Davis & Joan Crawford on the set of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (if you watched Feud's first season, he's played by Alfred Molina) made two of the most-revered film noirs of the era.  The first, Kiss Me Deadly, we profiled in a previous season (check out the review at the bottom of this page), but is a proper masterpiece (if you haven't seen it, you must, and also put down your damn phone during it as it's the kind of movie you need to immerse yourself into), but his second was far more infamous at the time it was made, and while it's not as good, that doesn't mean it's not a very strong follow-up picture from Aldrich.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place largely in one house (other than a cutaway to a party, I don't recall a scene that doesn't take place in the main character's home...which is how you can tell it was adapted from a play by Clifford Odets).  Charlie Castle (Palance) is a leading man living in a mansion, and is about to sign a contract with his studio to continue to make movies, even though he's not interested in such a contract because he keeps getting saddled with commercial garbage from the studio.  He's also worried about the impact it'll have on his marriage to wife Marion (Lupino), who is separated from him and seeing another man.  Things to come to a head when the studio chief Shriner Hoff (Steiger) basically blackmails Charlie into signing the deal, as he has knowledge of a vehicular homicide that Charlie caused that ultimately his friend Buddy went to jail for.  Charlie signs it, and in the wake sleeps with Buddy's wife (Hagen), but there's a problem-a woman was there the night Charlie had his hit-and-run, a struggling starlet named Dixie Evans (Winters), and she's threatening to go to a gossip columnist (clearly modeled after Hedda Hopper) to destroy Charlie's career.

The movie continues on, but we'll stop here for an intermission.  The Big Knife is one of several films that happened in the wake of the success of Sunset Boulevard that showed the uglier side of Hollywood.  We saw more of this with pictures like In a Lonely Place and The Bad and the Beautiful, but The Big Knife is one of the nastiest in this subgenre.  First off, it's at least somewhat based on a true story, and even more so off of a famous Hollywood legend.  In the early 1930's, John Huston was arrested (though ultimately absolved) of a hit-and-run involving a dancer who ran in front of his car.  Huston, unlike the character in the movie, was the actual person behind the wheel and unlike Charlie, wasn't drunk when it happened.  The legend involving Huston's accident is that he took the blame for Clark Gable, even in 1933 a major star for the studio and more valuable than Huston, and whose career couldn't handle the scandal (this is rebutted by pretty much everyone in retrospect as untrue as Gable was nowhere near the accident, but it's become enmeshed in both the Huston story and in the making of The Big Knife).

Then again, no one gets away scot-free here.  Rod Steiger is really good as Hoff, playing him as a malevolent monster, willing to destroy Charlie's life if it helps his bottom line.  It's also a clear homage to Harry Cohn, then the head of Columbia, who was furious when he saw the film.  In fact, despite a starry cast (Palance & Hagen had recently gotten Oscar nominations, Lupino & Steiger were still pretty big names) no studio would touch this film other than United Artists.  That was largely to do with the film's subject matter (tearing apart the star system), but also could've done with the film's bleak ending.  Winters' character dies (Winters, for the record, aces this part, which feels written for her as she gets to be drunk, lascivious, & downtrodden, which are all onscreen skills she perfected in the wake of A Place in the Sun), not from murder (as some expected), but getting hit by a bus.  Charlie, at that point, could find reprieve...but when his wife finds out about his affair with Jean Hagen's Connie, he can't take it.  He has no control in his life, and he kills himself offscreen.  

This is when maybe the most dastardly thing in the movie happens.  Ida Lupino wails in sorrow, and the camera zooms out, showing us first the apartment, and then the sides of a screen, implying (in a Twilight Zone-style twist) that we've been watching a fictional movie-within-a-movie.  The end credits roll before they do much with it, but it's a bitter note to end the picture on, with Aldrich/Odets commentating on us enjoying the sorrows of these beautiful people as entertainment in a meta way.  The film is sometimes a bit too heavy-handed, but the performances from Lupino, Steiger, & Winters are so strong (Palance is fine, but maybe a tad miscast...William Holden or Kirk Douglas would've been a better choice here since they were more convincing leading men) you won't care.  And of course, as is evidenced by this month, I love me a ruthless film noir, which this is.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Born to Kill, Brighton Rock, Brute Force, Call Northside 777, Caught, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Cry Wolf, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, The Naked City, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Secret Beyond the Door, Side Street, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Stranger on the Third Floor, They Drive By Night, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach, A Woman's Secret

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, Julie, Kansas City Confidential, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Lightning Strikes Twice, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps, Whirlpool

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Late Show, The Long Goodbye, Lost Highway, Night Moves, Nightcrawler, Le Samourai

OVP: Sudden Fear (1952)

Film: Sudden Fear (1952)

Stars: Joan Crawford, Jack Palance, Gloria Grahame

Director: David Miller

Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Actress-Joan Crawford, Supporting Actor-Jack Palance, Cinematography, Costume Design)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

This week our reviews are going to continue to be a mix of films from 2020 (it's hard to imagine that we are still a few weeks away from the conclusion of this snail-paced awards season) and continuing to look into the past as we, well, clean out my DVR.  Today is one of those past-facing titles, as I decided that I wanted to watch a few acting nominees that I've never seen before.  Joan Crawford would only win three Oscar citations in her career, and the last of those would come in 1952, for her work in Sudden Fear.  This film has some iconic imagery, even if it's not the first film you might name-check Crawford for, but it is also noteworthy not just for Crawford, but for bringing another eventual Oscar winner to the Academy's attention: Jack Palance.  Palance was so well-liked in this role that he essentially launched a strange career where he would alternate between international star and nearly work-for-hire parts before finally getting his proper moment-in-the-sun in City Slickers.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on Myra (Crawford), a brilliant & successful Broadway playwright who in the opening act of the film declines to give Lester Blaine (Palance) a part in her play because she feels he's wrong for the role.  They meet on a train, and seem to make up quickly, and that friendship blossoms into love.  Lester & Myra marry, but Myra (who is extremely wealthy) after the marriage dictates that most of her money will go to a foundation.  Thanks to a voice recorder in Myra's office, Myra (and the audience) discover after she says she'll leave some of her money to him in her will that Lester in fact planned on marrying Myra just for her money & humiliating her in the process, as he's in love instead with beautiful young Irene (Grahame), a former flame.  Myra also overhears on the recording that they are planning on killing her, knowing that if they do so before the will goes through that Lester will inherit her fortune.  After mistakenly breaking the recording, Myra must survive the weekend with both of these two plotting to kill her.  In the end, it is them who die, in a tragic case of mistaken identity, and Myra lives, much wiser from the experience.

The movie is noir, but it functions more as a melodrama.  I tend to enjoy melodramas, but I think the acting in them is hard to gage, and I'll be honest here-I don't get the love of Crawford in this role (and Crawford is generally one of my favorite actresses).  There's no depth to her Myra-Crawford plays her as a saint, but a saint so cloying you wonder how, precisely, she made it in the cutthroat world of theater.  There are also suspensions of belief (are we really intended to buy that beautiful, sexy Joan freaking Crawford has never been pursued by a man before Lester comes into the picture?) that make it harder to follow.  Crawford is a true movie star, and this is enjoyable to watch in parts, but is this good acting?  Probably not.

Palace is a bit better in a different part though again, so much of his character takes place offscreen that it's hard to gage (I get why he became a star after this, though, as he got to play a range of options with this duplicitous part).  Honestly, Gloria Grahame's side girl might be the best performance of the lot.  She is the one person who feels they exist outside the confines of a script that defies logic or convention.

The film won two additional Oscar nominations (and I suspect the score was probably close, though it mercifully was skipped as while the Elmer Bernstein music is sweeping, it impedes on the film at points, giving away key clues about the movie before they even occur).  The cinematography is sublime-great wide shots, and some clever uses of dream sequences.  The closet door ajar with the toy heading toward Crawford is ridiculously fun, and something Hitchcock would've been proud of.  And the costumes are intriguing.  I kind of like the iconic dual looks of both Crawford & Grahame in head scarfs...this would become one of Crawford's most recognizable screen moments (her firing a pearl-handled revolver into the dark dressed immaculately from head-to-toe), so they're doing something right.  Overall, though, I left Sudden Fear underwhelmed even though the actors, plot, and lensing all are things I would normally find irresistible.

OVP: Bagdad Cafe (1988)

Film: Bagdad Cafe (1988)
Stars: Marianne Sagebrecht, CCH Pounder, Jack Palance
Director: Percy Adlon
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"Calling You")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

The 1988 Academy Awards are an odd duck when it comes to the Best Original Song category, because the Oscars chose to inexplicably stick to only three nominees.  Looking through a few of my handier Oscar resources, I cannot find an actual reason as to why the Oscars went with three, as it certainly wasn't a lack of options.  You have not only Disney's "Why Should I Worry" from the Oliver & Company soundtrack (it would be another year before the music branch would have a ten-year crush on the Mouse House), as well as a major radio-friendly behemoth like "Kokomo" (Cocktail), which was from the Beach Boys & was literally a #1 hit with a major presence in the film (both of these tunes would be nominated for the Golden Globes).  Instead, the Oscars decided to skip both of these movies and instead honor a lilting ballad by a gospel singer from a movie that is almost completely forgotten today, Bagdad Cafe.

(Spoilers Ahead) Bagdad Cafe is an odd movie, I'm just going to start there before we get into the plot as the movie reads as conventional if you just go for a description.  Jasmin (Sagebrecht) is a German woman who has seemingly been abandoned by her husband on the side of the road in the middle of the California desert.  She comes across a rundown gas station/cafe/motel called the Bagdad Cafe, run by Brenda (Pounder), an irritable woman with two kids and a husband who has also just left her.  Brenda is suspicious of Jasmin, first about where she came from and then why she's so kind to her and her family, but eventually comes around on her, realizing that they have more in common than they don't.  The movie is populated with a series of odd characters who come to the Bagdad Cafe from their own humdrum world, including Rudi (Palance, whose career had a major rebound after this film which eventually resulted in him winning an Oscar four years later for City Slickers), a former Hollywood set decorator who becomes obsessed with painting (and wooing) Jasmin.  The film ends with everyone being friends, and Jasmin working for Brenda & potentially marrying Rudi.

Like I said, that sounds pretty normal, right?  The oddities start to come in when you look at the way Adlon approaches the film.  The set and characters are desolate, as if there's always more story behind them onscreen than what meets the eye.  There's Brenda's son, who is obsessed with Bach and read to me as "we're supposed to understand this guy is gay" until randomly the baby that Brenda is always throwing to anyone who will take it turns out to be her son's child, indicating a romantic life with a female that otherwise has not been hinted at before.  We also rarely get any indication as to why Jasmin and her husband seemingly broke up in the middle of the desert (there's a fight over something in the opening scenes, but it's in German and not subtitled, so we have no idea if he'll come back or not, or why he left a coffee canister on the side of the road).  The film is constantly about observation and feeling, but rarely does it make sense to someone who is involved with the plot.

These sorts of dangling participles in the movie should frustrate me more than they did, but the film is interesting and pleasant enough, and the sandy "Calling You" makes you feel a bit finer about the movie.  I've read reviews of the film, and I think it was considered more revolutionary at the time than it is now, a movie essentially where nothing actually happens, but we just check in on a few people who are living on the outskirts of life for a while.  I didn't take much to Pounder (an actress I generally adore) as a screaming woman who seems to only understand two modulations (for the first 70 minutes of the movie, she treats pretty much everyone around her like garbage, which is excusable to an extent considering her hard life but feels rough after a while).  But Bagdad Cafe never stops being interesting, even if you leave it unfulfilled.  The song is probably the movie's best attribute, though it doesn't have the same film-defining chorus of its Oscar vanquisher "Let the River Run" that year, but while I get why critics found it charming, I left pretty uninspired, having witnessed something that clearly had a vision in mind, but can't decide between total abstraction & narratively compelling.

OVP: The Silver Chalice (1954)

Film: The Silver Chalice (1954)
Stars: Virginia Mayo, Pier Angeli, Jack Palance, Paul Newman
Director: Victor Saville
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Cinematography, Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Virginia Mayo-click here to learn more about Ms. Mayo (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

It seems cruel to end Virginia Mayo's run as Star of the Month on such a low note, but, well, it's kind of where her career ended, and where oddly enough the career of another, much more famous star's began.  The Silver Chalice, a gigantic flop for Warner Brothers in the mid-50's (they lost over $1 million on the biblical epic), is most remembered today for being the screen debut of Paul Newman, then just a spry 29-year-old making his big-screen debut.  Newman famously hated the film, and once took out ads in the trades when it was going to air on television urging people not to see it (which of course had the opposite affect).  But it also marked the last film that Mayo did as a contract player at Warner Brothers, and really the last signficant film of her career.  While she'd get leading roles opposite Robert Ryan and Alan Ladd in the years after this, there would never again be a film of note in Mayo's career, even if that note was notorious, and she'd soon be following the lead of many other leading ladies of her era by doing guest work in television as the 1960's approached.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows a boy by the name of Basil, who is the gifted sculptor of a poor man who is adopted by a wealthy benefactor to be his son and heir to his fortune.  In the house, he continues to sculpt, and befriends a beautiful young girl who runs away but says she'll never forget him named Helena (as a child, played by a blonde Natalie Wood).  When the old man dies, Basil, now an adult (Newman), is denied his inheritance by his cruel uncle, and eventually is tracked to a house where he is a slave, and would have died except he is kidnapped and brought to Joseph of Arimathea, who wants him to create a silver chalice that will be modeled after the Holy Grail and feature the photos of the disciples and Jesus.  While he's there, he is torn between the adult Helena (Mayo), whom he loves and is having an affair with, and the saintly granddaughter of Joseph named Deborra (Angeli), who is a devout Christian and tries to win Basil to her side.  All-the-while, Helena's other lover Simon (Palance) has started to develop a cult-like status for his magic, and begins to think of himself as a god, as do the people of his city.  The film eventually culminates in Rome, where under Nero's Court Basil meets St. Peter (played by Lorne Greene of all people), finishes the chalice, and marries Deborra, while Simon goes mad (and essentially jumps off of a tower convinced he's able to fly), with Helena eventually being sacrificed by Nero as someone who must also jump to her doom.

The film sounds better than it is.  If you're hoping for a sudsy biblical soap opera, as that paragraph seems to have drawn, you'll find that it's more bloated than indulgent, with no one properly appreciating the camp of the film save for Mayo.  Newman, angel-faced and looking like an adonis, surely would be better in later pictures, but here is dull and listless in the lead, never entirely getting to the depth of the character he's playing; when the best thing you can say about a Paul Newman performance is that he looks good, you know it's a bust.  The same can be said for Angeli's whiny Deborra, and it's hard to tell what was going on with Jack Palance's Simon.  It's such a weird departure for the Hollywood tough man to be playing a slightly effeminate conjurer of tricks (he's straight, but you get a whisper of something else from what Palance is projecting, that perhaps he'd be willing to give it a try with Basil if the opportunity presented itself), and he can't handle it.  The last few moments where he throws himself to his doom are truly horrendous scenes from an actor who should have known better.

I have a soft spot for biblical epics, but this one falls flat.  It received two citations for Cinematography and Score, but neither of these components are all that remarkable.  There's some great shots during Simon's death scene that are interesting (the climbing up of the stairs is cool), but the blank sets, especially compared to Ben-Hur just five years later, feel pretty wooden by comparison.  The music is fine, if predictable work from Franz Waxman-there's nothing particularly melodic or individual about his work here that would make the film stand apart, and one wonders if he made it on name alone.

Arguably the best part of the film, and that's not saying as much as it should, is Mayo.  She plays Helena as a gal-about-town, the sort of creation that surely wouldn't have existed during Nero's reign, more Mae West than Mary Magdalene.  It was hard to watch this and not think of Anne Baxter two years later as the lusty Nefertari in The Ten Commandments, as clearly Baxter had to have seen Mayo in her work here as she heavily borrows from it.  Helena's defiance at the end, where she will die but with her head-held-high shows the makings of a better picture, one from her point-of-view (she's clearly power-hungry for Simon and lusts for Basil, and I love that that's not hidden in a film of 1954).  Because of her horniness she can't get through the film unscathed (it is the 1950's, after all), but there's a better picture in her work here, and it's a pity that this was, for all-intents-and-purposes, the final significant movie of Mayo's career.

Friday we'll investigate a different actress, one more known for her work in musical comedies than the dramas that featured through Mayo's work, but before we go, please share your thoughts on our Star of the Month-do you have a favorite Virginia Mayo performance?