The Big Knife (The Associates and Aldrich, United Artists, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Jewel Robbery TCM showcased the 1955 film The Big Knife, directed by Robert Aldrich and written by James Poe from a play by Clifford Odets that was a massive attack on Hollywood and its values (or lack thereof). The Big Knife was originally produced on stage in 1949 as a vehicle for John Garfield, friend of Odets and fellow member of Broadway’s Group Theatre. The play mirrored the discontent of both playwright and star over their Hollywood careers; Garfield (true name: Julius Garfinkel) had signed a long-term contract with Warner Bros. and had become a movie “name,” but at the cost of his Left-wing politics and his sense of personal integrity. He’d also “gone Hollywood” in the worst way, drinking a lot to mask his sorrows and engaging in extra-relational activities with his pick of the lovely young ladies available to someone in his position. In The Big Knife Garfield became “Charlie Castle,” formerly Kass (played by Jack Palance in the movie), major star for “Hoff-Federated Pictures,” run by studio head Stanley Shriner Hoff (Rod Steiger, in a chillingly effective star turn I suspect influenced Steiger’s On the Waterfront co-star Marlon Brando in his performance as Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather 17 years later). As the story opens, Charlie Castle is just about to complete his contract with Hoff-Federated, and Hoff and his even slimier assistant, Smiley Coy (Wendell Corey), are determined to get him to renew. Castle’s wife Marion (Ida Lupino) is equally determined to make sure he doesn’t renew; she’s already separated from him and has taken their son Billy (Mike Winkleman) with her, and she’s threatening to divorce him if he re-signs with Hoff. Marion was already married to Castle during their New York days, when he was an up-and-coming actor with the Group Theatre and also an active Leftist. She’s unhappy that Charlie has given all that up for a life making trivial movies for tons of money, and especially unhappy about all the drinking and whoring her husband is doing in his spare time.

But Hoff has a powerful hold over Charlie: two years earlier he was driving drunk and he ran over a young boy, killing him. Hoff’s studio got his personal assistant, Buddy Bliss (Paul Langton), to take the rap for him; Buddy has just been released from his two-year prison sentence for manslaughter even though Charlie was the real killer. What’s more, when Charlie hit the kid he wasn’t alone in the car. One of his girlfriends de jour, Dixie Evans (Shelley Winters, also quite good before her roles became indistinguishable parodies of each other), was with him and now she’s threatening to go public with her story. Unable to keep buying her silence, Hoff and Coy talk matter-of-factly about having her killed. Part of the problem with The Big Knife is that the way Odets has built his plot, it seems to be heading towards the make-or-break moment of whether Castle signs his new contract with Hoff-Federated or not – but he re-signs only about 45 minutes into this nearly two-hour film and that doesn’t leave much for the rest of the running time to be about. He calls Marion to tell him he’s renewed his contract, and she immediately hangs up on him. He also gets into a fight with Buddy Bliss because one of Castle’s disposable sex partners was Bliss’s wife Connie (Jean Hagen, in a quite different role from the ditzy star she played in her other film about Hollywood, Singin’ in the Rain, three years earlier).

Another plot twist occurs when it’s revealed that Marion Castle has been dating playwright Hank Teagle (Wesley Addy), a man of unshakeable integrity Clifford Odets obviously based on himself (or at least his own idea of himself), and Stanley Hoff brings out some records of the bug he placed in their room to get evidence that Hank and Marion were having sex together, apparently so Charlie would dump Marion at long last and end his long-term flirtation with their once-shared social ideals. When Charlie Castle sees what’s happening, he grabs all but one of the records and that one, which ends up on Charlie’s turntable, reveals that Marion and Hank weren’t having sex but were just talking about personal integrity. The film creaks to a climax when Charlie Castle announces to the other principals that he’s going to take a bath – his Black manservant Russell (Bill Walker, who’s depicted pretty ordinarily despite the reputation of Clifford Odets for Leftist politics) draws the water for him – only as they wait for him downstairs they notice that water is dripping from the ceiling. They go upstairs to the bathroom and break down the door – and discover that Charlie Castle has killed himself, slashing himself at least three times to make sure he’d bleed out before anyone could rescue him. Hoff and Coy order up a cover story saying that Castle had died of a heart attack – ironically, what the real John Garfield did die of in New York in 1951 – and the Hollywood cover-up machine grinds on.

The Big Knife is an intriguing movie, though it has two major flaws that director Robert Aldrich identified when he was interviewed by Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their 1969 book The Celluloid Muse. One was that John Garfield had already been dead for four years when Aldrich made the film, and the other actors at the time who could have reproduced his star charisma – Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, James Dean, even Rock Hudson – were either contractually unavailable or would have cost more money than Aldrich had. Though Jack Palance had a long history as a highly successful character actor, Aldrich said, “lay audiences could not believe that Jack Palance was a movie star.” Also he felt that there was a basic problem with the story that neither he, James Poe nor Clifford Odets ever licked: “to understand that the taking or not taking of $5,000 per week [the fee Castle is offered to renew his contract] was not primarily a monetary problem; it was a problem of internal integrity such as you or I or the guy at the gas station might have.” Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, got it into his head that the character of Stanley Hoff was based on him and threatened retaliation against Aldrich – though that must not have got very far because Aldrich’s very next film, Autumn Leaves, was made at Columbia. My husband Charles came home from work a few minutes before The Big Knife ended and he said he remembered watching it with me – something I had no recollection of (in fact, one reason I wanted to watch it Saturday night was because I’d never seen it before, or at least I thought I hadn’t!). He said he remembered the bugged records (that scene had taken place just before he arrived), though quite a few other films of the period used records similarly, and there’s even a parody of such scenes at the end of Bob Hope’s 1947 spoof of film noir, My Favorite Brunette!