While the Hollywood
autocritique (or ‘taking-the-piss-out-of-itself’ movie) shining the spotlight
on some of the more unsavory practices and ideologies of the Golden Age of
Hollywood are hardly new with seemingly more immediate relevance than ever, few
filmmakers-as-critics plunged their daggers quite as deep into Tinseltown as writer-director
Robert Aldrich. Originally an assistant
director before working his way up through television direction before
producing and helming his own features, Aldrich is best known for the Lee
Majors’ starring war film The Dirty Dozen
and the survival action thriller The
Flight of the Phoenix.
Most filmgoers are aware of
Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard taking
on the Golden Age of Hollywood but few are aware of Aldrich’s cinematic tussles
with Tinseltown. Among the ones that
stand out in Aldrich’s takedown of the Hollywood system are Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? concerning
two fading child actresses and a stage-to-film adaptation of playwright
Clifford Odets’ The Big Knife. Originally a Broadway production directed by
Lee Strasberg starring John Garfield who passed away just three years before
Aldrich’s film came about, The Big Knife stars
Jack Palance as action movie star Charlie Castle and his ongoing war with
fearsome and domineering Hollywood studio head Stanley Shriner Hoff (Rod
Steiger).
Castle, living in his
expensive Hollywood home, has everything but his personal freedom to pursue the
film roles he wants and to spend much needed time with his wife Marion (Ida
Lupino) who is on the cusp of divorcing him.
Tiring of doing the same uninspired B movie roles and wanting to enrich
his marriage, Castle vows to void his contract with Hoff’s studio until Hoff
himself shows up at home threatening to blackmail him with a sordid incident in
the actor’s past unless he renews his contract. What follows are a series of
tense shouting matches between Palance and Steiger one-upping each other in
equally over the top performances that border on Samuel Fuller’s trademark
melodramatics and encounters with various figures amid Castle’s Hollywood posse
of drunkards and sex starved starlets ready to hop into the casting couch for
their next big break.
To this day, The Big Knife carries it’s staunch band
of defenders and detractors, some finding it a scathing takedown of the likes
of Hollywood players Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn (who took person offense at
the picture’s snarky parody of himself) while others taking the whole thing as
an overwrought screaming match where Palance and Steiger turn the volume up
well past eleven. Among the film’s
stronger and more subtle assets are Ida Lupino as Castle’s no-nonsense wife who
just wants to live a normal life with the man she loves, and a fleeting but
memorable cameo by a then unknown Shelley Winters as an up and coming actress
who may know a thing or two about Castle’s dirty little secret past.
For my money, the
performances of this melodrama are appropriate in setting the stage for this
unfettered gaze at the opulent lifestyle of a well-to-do actor being more in
line with slavery than superstardom. Aiding
the proceedings are Frank De Vol’s subtly seductive and at times mournful score
and Academy Award winning cinematographer Ernest Laszlo’s confining and often
claustrophobic camerawork, offering more than a few canted angles of Hollywood’s
warped and deeply damaged view of itself.
One of the film’s wonders is the set piece of the house itself, with
actor Charlie Castle and his wife Marion desperately trying to get some alone
time as anybody and everybody seem to pass through their household without
knocking first, reinforcing the notion of the Hollywood life being anything but
their own.
Despite criticisms that
adapting Odets’ play as written to screen makes the case for why film and
theater are vastly different mediums, The
Big Knife couldn’t have resurfaced at a more pressing time when Hollywood
and the increasingly salacious and unsavory behind-the-scenes machinations
running the film industry keep coming to light.
Steiger and Palance have always been known as over the top players and
with The Big Knife they couldn’t have
found a better stage to unleash their pent up rages with their teeth out.
Yes the film wears the stage
play roots upon it’s sleeve and some wonder whether or not some changes could
have been made during the film’s transition from floor to screen. As such however, The Big Knife joins films like All
About Eve, Inserts, Sunset Boulevard and of course The Day of the Locust in giving viewers
what many now regard as a far more realistic depiction of the movie business as
it really is, painting the picture of Hollywood as a Hellscape rather than
Heaven.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki