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