The Big Knife
With Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Rod Steiger.
US, 1955, 35mm, black & white, 111 min.
Print source: Park Circus
Within the legacy of the Hollywood exposé, a subgenre that flowered in the 1950s as much to satiate the egos of industry insiders as to gratify audience appetites for behind-the-scenes scandal, The Big Knife could be slotted alongside Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place as an example of a work that digs a little too close to the bone for comfort. Based on a 1949 Clifford Odets play, the film dramatizes the struggles of a big-name actor (Jack Palance) under threatening pressures from his producers to sign a long-term contract that will further jeopardize his failing marriage—a dilemma that sinks him into depression at a perilous rate as negotiations heat up. Enhancing the atmosphere of despair, Aldrich stages almost the entire affair in the star’s antiseptic Bel Air living room, a designer-chic dungeon in which the perspiring, loungewear-clad Palance holes up to avoid the media’s prying eyes and ears. Shot in lengthy takes at a clinical distance so as to chart how power dynamics play out through body language, The Big Knife penetrates jagged emotional depths in examining the toll of enforced compromise in a system where no subordinate participant can ever fully make a decision in his or her own interest.
