Rating: 
Summary: Many-layered classic
Review: Years later, another look at The Big Knife. Due respect to other reviewers, but "blacklist" analogies never occurred to me when first viewed in 1956... or anytime after, nor are they necessary to an appreciation of the film. The cast alone, even for those possibly indifferent to the younger Jack Palance, make this something to see: Ida Lupino, Wendell Corey, Everett Sloane, Jean Hagen, Shelley Winters, Ilka Chase, and the absolutely, quintessential Rod Steiger: exuberantly, enthusiastically, maniacally overacting as the LBMayer/HarryCohn/JackWarner producer. Steiger farcically, outrageously, climbs the curtains and gnaws the rugs but is great fun to watch. A mid-fifties polemic upon the Big Bad Castrating Studio System, featuring some of the choicest Odets rococo, Steiger makes it seem also a blast at Actors Studio and The Method. Alas, the ending is unbearably, incredibly, insupportably, contextually wrong and amateurishly executed, too horrible even to be camp,as a nattering moralist is trotted center stage to prate nobly while a---wait for it!--yes, a Demillian Celestial Chorus oohs and ums.
Rating:
Summary: Deep in the Dark 1950s
Review: For anyone like myself who has a fondness for the darker 1950s productions like Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success or Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, this movie--which might well have been called Faust in Bel Air--is an absolute must. Robert Aldrich was a perfect director for this kind of material, although The Big Knife--most of whose action takes place on a single set--is less kinetic than his earlier Kiss Me Deadly. Two great movies, Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard and George Cukor's A Star Is Born, had already wickedly dissected the less glamorous side of life in the movie industry, but The Big Knife not only presents a far gloomier view of Hollywood, but makes the backstage intrigues of the motion picture capital into a metaphor for the rampant political paranoia of Cold War era America. The movie is based on a 1949 play by Clifford Odets--who had himself named names to HUAC in order to continue working in the movies--about an actor being blackmailed by a Mephistophelean producer, but when Aldrich and James Poe transferred the drama into the context of the middle 1950s, no halfway knowledgeable viewer could have missed the analogy to the blacklist--particularly since the movie depicts the producer, brilliantly played by Rod Steiger, as a vicious reactionary in the mold of L.B. Mayer who worships General Douglas MacArthur. In addition, The Big Knife may also be seen as a reply to Kazan's On the Waterfront, which glorified an informer--and tacitly rationalized the director's own collaboration with HUAC--by showing its hero choosing to commit suicide rather than capitulate to the evil Steiger. As the other reviews note, the performances are all remarkable, but I was especially impressed by Shelley Winters as a would-be starlet. She only has one extended scene, but that alone is more than worth the price of the video, which is ridiculously low-priced.
Rating: 
Summary: TOUGH ENTERTAINMENT.....
Review: Great movie. Big movie star Charlie Castle (Jack Palance) doesn't want to renew his contract to his studio. He wants to reclaim his soul and his family who have left him. But The Boss (Rod Steiger---going full-blast) won't hear of it. Castle's pictures make money and he will do anything to keep it rolling in. Wendell Corey is slime personified as The Boss' right-hand man. Ida Lupino is Castle's wife who loves him and wants him to have his soul back too. Jean Hagen is the trampy evil wife of Castle's best friend and Shelley Winters appears as a troubled starlet and party girl for the Big Boys who knows (and drinks) too much. According to this story, down and dirty blackmail was how they kept stars in line back in the studio days and Castle has a tragic scandal to hide. Based on Clifford Odets' play, the film shows it's stage origins but is fascinating to watch nonetheless for the performances of the top-notch cast. A must see for film buffs and the DVD looks great. A keeper for your collection.
Rating:
Summary: dark film that ages well
Review: Here's a film with superb acting and a great script. It also ages well and doesn't seem dated. Riveting. Understated acting with dark subtleties. The exception is Rod Steiger, who turns in my favorite performance of his career - as a megalomaniacal, sleazy yet debonair movie mogul. His performance is dynamic and intense. Wendell Corey and Shelley Winter turn in excellent supporting roles.A nihlistic, dark, riveting film. Excellent.
Rating:
Summary: Hollywood From the Bottom Up
Review: In just one of the trenchant lines in this superbly written film, Shelley Winters's character, a pathetic starlet/whore, tells the film's tortured protagonist (Palance), "You don't see these people the way I do, from the bottom." Unlike the preponderance of other reviewers here, I love Rod Steiger's performance as studio chief Stanley Shriner Hoff. Steiger has an incredible dynamic range-one critic called him a cross between a cobra and a bull. I've read Odets' play, and the film is a remarkably faithfull adaptation. Robert Aldrich's films could often be coarse and catered to an audience of jaded working class men looking for action, but here he comes through with one of his best films.
Rating:
Summary: Red Neon Lights and Drunken Blackbirds
Review: The corn is as high as a movie star's eye in the yammer-yammer-yammer of Clifford Odets's Hollywood play THE BIG KNIFE, and Robert Aldrich's bristling film version can't do much to open up the talkfest. But there's some fascinating stuff here. For starters, the model for Jack Palance's cornered movie star is obviously John Garfield, but Odets seems to use the character as a mouthpiece for why he himself had failed to live up to his spectacular beginnings on Broadway. The country of those who have sold out is familiar territory to Odets, and scattered in lots of very purple prose lie nuggets of sharply-observed writing. The players know the terrain, too, and they tear into their roles with gusto. Palance, Ida Lupino, and Miss Shelley Winters (what's with her billing here?) are all marvelous, and Rod Steiger is jawdroppingly good. This is the 50's, remember, when George Stevens (held up here as a model of "meaningful" filmmaking) gave us the ultra-waspy Millie Perkins as Anne Frank, which makes Steiger's Jewish inflections and rhythms in an exceedingly unsympathetic role a risky, but very rewarding, choice. (Hollywood had generally taken the guts and the ethnicity out of Odets, as per the very denatured film of GOLDEN BOY.) When Steiger gets into gear, you can't take your eyes off him. Special kudoes, too, to Jean Hagen. Those who only remember her in SINGIN' IN THE RAIN are in for a shock. Playing a drunken, masochistic adulteress, she manages to be simultaneously childlike, sexy, pathetic and chilling. Good support from dependables like Ilka Chase, Wesley Addy, and Wendell Corey, too. Really worth a look.
Rating:
Summary: A Hardbitten Look at Hollywood in the 1950's
Review: This film offers an amazingly dark and cynical look at the inner workings of Hollywood in the 1950's. Jack Palance gives one of his best performances as a man whose charmed life as a sought-after movie star is torn apart by greed, jealousy and egotism. For fans of snappy dialogue, this movie is a treasure-trove. Jack to a friend on the phone: "Go out! Find a bar! Sauce up!" Shelly Winters: "If I have another drink I'm gonna see a snake!" Studio Exec: "A woman with 6 martinis can ruin a city." Highly recommended for cinemasts who love movies about the movie biz.
Rating:
Summary: A Hardbitten Look at Hollywood in the 1950's
Review: This film offers an amazingly dark and cynical look at the inner workings of Hollywood in the 1950's. Jack Palance gives one of his best performances as a man whose charmed life as a sought-after movie star is torn apart by greed, jealousy and egotism. For fans of snappy dialogue, this movie is a treasure-trove. Jack to a friend on the phone: "Go out! Find a bar! Sauce up!" Shelly Winters: "If I have another drink I'm gonna see a snake!" Studio Exec: "A woman with 6 martinis can ruin a city." Highly recommended for cinemasts who love movies about the movie biz.
Rating:
Summary: Hollywood stabbing itself in the back
Review: This is a superbly searing attack on the days of the old studio system when actors were placed under seven year contracts by the big studios.Jack Palance is great as the tortured and angst-ridden actor Charlie Castle who is put under terrific mental pressure to sign a new contract by the deranged studio boss Stanley Hoff-played by a massively overacting Rod Steiger.Steiger's performance in fact,is a great example of the method school of acting taken too far-it becomes a caricature,a parody of a character rather than a realistic portrayal.That said though,his performance is compulsively watchable and entertaining.
Rating:
Summary: 50's Exotica
Review: Too talky for some, too stage-bound for others, too strident for all, this is not a movie for everyone. Yet The Big Knife contiues to fascinate at the same time it annoys. Maybe it's the savage depiction of Hollywood politics and the amoral glamor industry surrounding it. After all, neither blackmail nor murder is off-limits to egomanical studio boss Stanley Hoff ( vintage Rod Steiger), while the human sharks swimming around him behave nothing like opening night at the Oscars. Maybe it's the sterling cast, featuring such 50's exotica as Steiger, Jack Palance, Wendell Corey, and Shelley Winters. In the end, of course, everyone gets to explode on screen except the ice cold Corey whose chronic bemusement proves ultimately more satanic than cynical. Whatever the reason, the result is an over-the-top cavalcade of unusual flair. It's likely that producer-director Robert Aldrich targeted the film in behalf of blacklisted mentor Abraham Polonsky with whom he had collabrated on 1948's Force of Evil. After all, the year was 1955 and the all-powerful list could not be attacked directly, so what better vehicle than Clifford Odet's corrosive stage play adapted for all America to see. (Odets would do the same for Broadway in 1957's revealing Sweet Smell of Success.) It's fun to imagine how Aldrich's resulting indictment played in studio screening rooms where real reputations were at stake. Then too, much of the film's dirty laundry appears based on fact. The hit and run on Clark Gable's hushed-up 1933 episode; the Palance character on John Garfield's death at 39, listed officially as heart attack. It's hard to picture the producers ever believing such curdled fare would actually make money. Of course it didn't, angering many ticket-buyers with a title that seemed to imply real action instead of endless palaver. Still, this overheated exercise in shameless baroque remains an interesting oddity. A permanent record not only of individual styles, but of artistic protest amidst the throes of cultural repression.
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