Blu-ray Review: “The Big Knife” Is A Wonderful New Edition Of An Old Hollywood Dud

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Hollywood actor Charles Castle is pressured by his studio boss into a criminal cover-up to protect his valuable career.

“The Big Knife” was written by Clifford Odets, which is interesting for two reasons. First, Odets originally wrote this script which depicts the evil ways of Hollywood and its filmmaking system as a play. There’s probably a reason why Odets wrote a script condemning Hollywood in a non-cinema medium. Second, he wrote the play in 1949 during the beginning of the Hollywood blacklist. While “The Big Knife” is about an actor that gets ruined by the medium, Odets would testify before the House Committee in 1952 and name numerous individuals who were affiliated with the Communist party. Many of the contemporary reviews of “The Big Knife” refused to mention this point, but it’s an interesting conjecture now that it’s long recorded film history. So make what you will of this background, but it’s tempting to view Odets as either cursed by the Hollywood system and forced to name parties or as a man who sold out to rat on his friends.

The film was directed by Robert Aldrich, who is remembered for a long list of films that contained a subversive undercurrent including some movies I like quite a lot such as “The Dirty Dozen,” “The Longest Yard,” and “Flight of the Phoenix.” “The Big Knife,” however, I don’t like nearly as much as these films. That’s due mainly to the script and not the director or the talent, which includes a handful of my favorite Hollywood actors and actresses at the time.

Charlie Castle (Jack Palance) wants to leave the Hollywood contract system and give up his life as a movie star. Over his years as an actor, Castle has lost his bite and is now also at risk of losing his wife. For that note, I don’t understand the marriage depicted in the film. Charlie’s wife, Marion Castle (Ida Lupin), still has Charlie’s last name but is seeing a writer named Hank Teagle (Wesley Addy).

The trouble that Charlie faces in leaving his contract is the controlling and frightening, Stanley Hoff (Rod Steiger). Hoff wants Charlie to continue acting. After Charlie is involved in a scandal, Hoff uses details of this involvement to break Charlie. At one point, however, Charlie refuses to aid one of Hoff’s men in killing Dixie Evans (Shelley Winters), a struggling starlet. At the point that the film decides to kill off Dixie, however, it enters into a place where the pathos of the characters stops being believable. The film ends without a satisfactory conclusion or much of a believable trajectory for the characters. As a result, “The Big Knife” starts out angry and ends up falling over its own feet before the credits roll.

While I don’t particularly like the film, the remastering is awfully good and there’s a neat documentary about the man who designed the title sequence for the movie.

Now available on a Special Edition Blu-ray from Arrow Video