The Big Knife: Hollywood Kills

Released in 1955, The Big Knife wasn’t Robert Aldrich’s biggest early career success – or latter career for that matter. Those accolades belong to Kiss Me Deadly and The Dirty Dozen, respectively. This flick, though, staring Jack Palance as Charles Castle, a troubled Hollywood actor weighted down by career and real life decisions, doesn’t rank to poorly on Aldrich’s list of accomplishments.

Based on a Clifford Odets play of the same name, the filmic version arrives referencing Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial ‘M’ for Murder, which was released the previous year, in its use of pretty much a single setting throughout the entire film. Oddly enough, beyond just the settings in each film being constrained within a single room of a residence, both features concern themselves with blackmail to a certain extent. Love is invariably involved, but only does the Aldrich film conclude in outrageously macabre tones.

After the artistic, if not popular success of his previous work Kiss Me Deadly, Aldrich constructed a film – or reconstituted a play – that finds its main purpose in disavowing the majesty of Hollywood and its surrounding players. Everyone from studio heads to entertainment journalists to agents and trainers get the once over. And none of it’s all too kindly.

Recurring in this feature after having found an interesting place within the narrative of Kiss Me Deadly is a peripheral character, here a trainer and in the prior film a mechanic, that comes off as wholly comedic, if only accidentally.

Castle is endlessly looking to relax from his stressful life which includes a wife who leaves and comes back to him something like three times in and hour and a half and a slew of studio honchos nagging him about his contract, which is up for renewal. His trainer, in an tiresome series of pats on the back, neck rubs and towel fetching appears to be something like a lap dog. Some critics ponder whether or not the character is meant to be imbued with some homoerotic energy, but that’s going a bit far. It’s just amusing to watch a man dote on Castle as the actor works his way through at least four women by film’s end.

The crux of the whole thing is that Castle, while drunk, ran over a kid a few years back with his manager taking the blame and doing time to save the man’s career. That’s all coming to a head now as the studio hacks who want to re-up Castle’s contract, which he’s not interested in, helped cover up the whole mess. As an added plot twist, Castle had a woman with him at the time of the accident – and it wasn’t his wife.

So, Palance’s character seems to be in the middle of something he can’t get out of. Does he sign the contract that appears so distasteful or does he give up his marriage? There’s no good answer. But as everyone finally clears out of his home, the actor gives his wife a few sugary lines and heads upstairs to take a bath. We don’t see him again.