The Big Knife

It's not often that a Hollywood movie indulges in a succinct summary of George Bernard Shaw's essay, "The Quintessence of Ibsenism".  But you will find that indulgence in Robert Aldrich's 1955 melodrama The Big Knife.  The film shows us goblin-faced Jack Palance as a movie star, Charlie Cass, brooding on the distinction between philistines, idealists, and realists.  The allusion is showy and not really apposite but it''s part of the heightened diction and extravagant manner of the dialogue in this film, written by Clifford Odets and, apparently, first presented as a Broadway play.  The film is static and takes place on a single set, a lavish Hollywood home decorated by a large Rouault painting of a morbid-lookiing clown and a large sculpted head of the Buddha.  Everything you need to know about middle-brow culture in the nineteen-fifties is encoded in the film's single set, a location that one can imagine fitting quite comfortably under the proscenium arch of a Broadway theater.  There's an offstage bedroom upstairs, above a spiral of metal steps with a vaguely nautical aspect -- this is where the film's mischief and mayhem occurs.  A hi-fi with tuner and record-player is present to play Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony".  The furniture is all sleek and modernist -- it looks like Eames designed the room and furnishings. Everything about the movie's milieu and content screams the sort of stylish Playboy-boy pad intelligence of the mid-fifties.  I know:  my father, a jazz fan had a book of Rouault pictures, a hi-fi on which he played 78 rpm discs of Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony" and an abstract expressionist image of a scarcely recognizable clown painted by one of his friends who was attending the Institute of Art in Minneapolis.  My father who was from central Nebraska didn't know anything about Ibsen -- theater didn't exist in the Sand Hills town from which he came, but his father, a Lutheran minister had a book of Ibsen's plays (Modern Library in an Everyman edition) that probably had never been read.  If one were inclined, we might lament the general decay of taste and intelligence in this country -- the level of culture on display in Odets' play and the very effective movie made from that script, lean and mean and totally lucid as directed by Robert Aldrich, is sadly absent from most of what passes for art and film today.  I should observe that my father greatly admired Jack Palance, but for his performance as the lethal gunfighter in Shane:  as Shane says to the little boy who is his acolyte -- "He was fast...fast on the draw."

The situation in The Big Knife bears some similarity to Ibsen's plays such as Hedda Gabler.  The context involves a crime, the concealment of that crime, blackmail, and wounded idealism.  More than a little sexual infidelity is thrown in for a good measure and the screenplay is an exercise in anguished solemnity and angst leavened by a good deal of lurid, trashy melodrama.  I am praising this movie, by the way, and suggesting that you find a way to see it.  The matinee idol Charlie Cass is owned by Stanley Hoff, a monstrous entrepreneur and studio boss.  Cass is married and his wife detests Hoff and believes that Cass' work for the man traduces all of his ideals -- apparently, Cass was once involved in leftist, radical theater in the thirties (the type of theater associated with Clifford Odets), but now he has succumbed to the more lucrative and reactionary film industry.  Cass' contract with Hoff's studio has expired and the boss wants him to sign up for another seven year term, a business proposal detested by Cass' idealistic wife played by Ida Lupino.  The relationship between Cass and his wife is complicated by the movie star's serial infidelty and he has separated from his spouse who serves as the voice of his aggrieved conscience in this film.  At a party two years earlier, Cass got drunk, crashed his car, killing a child in the process.  With him in the car at the time was a floozy, Dixie, played convincingly and with more than a morsel of bathos by Shelley Winters (here credited as "Miss Shelley Winters).  The studio has covered up the hit-and-run accident to the extent of pinning the crime on Cass' longsuffering business manager -- indeed, the manager has served nine months in jail for the crime he didn't commit.  When Cass tells Hoff that he won't sign the contract renewal.  Hoff with his vicious henchman threatens to expose the movie star's crime.  Dixie shows up, swilling tequila, and tries to seduce Cass successfully, it seems.  As in Greek drama (and there are Greek masks signifying comedy and tragedy over the hearth), the unseemly stuff occurs offstage into a sort of loft above the main living room set.  Cass' virtuous wife shows up and there's more debate about the situation.  Cass first signs the contract but, then, rebels inducing a titanic rage in Stanley Hoff.  Meanwhile, Dixie has been thrashed severely by Hoff for threatening to expose the crime (Hoff's broken several of her ribs).  She's self-medicating in a local bar and has had "six martinis".  Hoff sends a henchman to murder her, announcing these plans to Cass.  And, so it goes.  The climatic catastrophe is off-stage as in Oedipus Rex announced by shrieks of servants.

Your response to this stuff will be dictated by how your respond to Odets heightened and lyrical dialogue.  Plenty of people were critical of Odets bombastic rhetoric even at the time he produced it.  But the movie is now my age, 71 going on 72, and time has burnished Odets' dialogue with its patina.  Some of his phrases are insufferable -- "you have peritonitis of the soul" -- but much of his writing now seems archaic, gnarled in a pleasantly complex way, even, dare I say it, Shakespearian.