(Robert Aldrich, US 1955, 111 min., 35mm)
Based on Clifford Odets’s stunning stage play, written after spending a tumultuous decade in Hollywood, The Big Knife attacks the corruption inherent in making stars and keeping them on top. Jack Palance plays Charlie Castle, Hollywood royalty, a successful actor who seems to be able to get away with anything. His wife, Marion (Ida Lupino), however, is sick of the life and wants to move back home. Offered a new seven-year contract, Charlie is conflicted, knowing that his signature on that contract will mean divorce from Marion. When past sins are threatened to be revealed, Charlie’s path appears set, but when he attempts to salvage a modicum of integrity by standing up to the very system of exploitation that made him a star, he finds himself being blackmailed by merciless studio producer Stanely Shriner Hoff (Rod Steiger). Cinematographer Ernest Laszlo turns Charlie’s extravagant house into a gilded prison, using every set and shadow to full effect. A relentlessly dark portrayal of the lies and manipulations upon which Hollywood thrives, The Big Knife is also a thinly veiled critique of McCarthyism and the tyranny of the blacklist.