THE BIG KNIFE
US, 1955, 104 minutes, Black and white.
Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Wendell Corey, Jean Hagen, Shelley Winters, Rod Steiger.
Directed by Robert Aldrich,
The Big Knife is a film about the dark side of Hollywood. The Bad and the Beautiful had appeared three years earlier, focusing on an unscrupulous director. This time (**film?), The Big Knife, focuses on a Hollywood star who wants to make into better films and is confronted by a crumbling career, pressure from the studios, failure in his marriage. The two films are companion pieces.
The film offers a fine role for Jack Palance who appeared in many films of this period but who was destined to be a character and action film star. There is strong support from Ida Lupino as his wife, Rod Steiger as the studio executive and Wendell Corey as an agent.
The film was directed by Robert Aldrich, winning for him the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1955. Aldrich had begun in small films such as The Big Leaguer, moving to Apache and Vera Cruz in 1954. With his Mickey Spillane adaptation, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Big Knife he moved into a higher-bracket film-making, following it with Autumn Leaves and Attack. By the early 1960s he was one of the top-bracket directors with such films as The Last Sunset, Sodom and Gomorrah, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte. He directed the Rat Pack in Four for Texas and went on to make The Flight of the Phoenix and The Dirty Dozen. He continued a very successful career during the 1970s with a range of action films like Too Late the Hero, Ulzana’s Raid, Emperor of the North Pole and two films with Burt Reynolds, The Longest Yard and Hassle.
There have been many films about Hollywood and its oppression and dark side. This is one of the best.
1. To what does the title refer? Its connection with the ending?
2. The final emotional impression of the film? Why?
3. Did the film deal with real people and real situations?
4. Comment on the structure of the film: the opening credits with Charlie Castle's face, the play structure of the film, the dialogue very heavy, the opening sequence with Pattie Benedict, the centrality of Charlie Castle and each of the characters meeting and encountering him?
5. Was this a just picture of Hollywood? Why? What impression did it make? How is Hollywood an image of the world of power struggles and cruelty and deception?
6. How was power and power struggle an important theme of this film? How did each of the characters illustrate this? Final impressions about the nature of power and the struggles between human beings for domination?
7. How was love a theme of this film? Especially between Charlie and Marion? The relationship between the Blisses? Connie Bliss and Charlie? Marion and Hank? Loyalties and families and careers and human emotions?
8. What kind of person was Charlie Castle - was he well explained at the beginning of the film, with his ambitions and lost ideals, and his need for survival? What more to be found out about him? Was he courageous, a tiger? What had destroyed him? Had he destroyed himself? The power of others over him, his failures, his weakness for women, his deceptions? Comment on his encounters with each of the major characters? What did he finally make of himself at the end of the film? Who drove him to death? Was this death well prepared for? Did Jack, Palance make a convincing Charlie?
9. What was your opinion of Marion - how well did she love Charlie? How good a wife and support was she? Why was she so faithful? Was she selfish in any way? Did she push Charlie too hard? Why did she resist the offer of Hank for marriage? What support did she give him at the end? How happy did she make him in his death?
10. What kind of person was Stanley Hoff? Was he a caricature? Are big businessmen like this? Why did he have such followers as Smiley? Why was he cruel, why did he talk about himself all the time, his brutality to Dixie? His brutality and pressures on Charlie? His fear of physical pain? Was there anything likeable about his character?
11. What kind of person was Smiley? How did he become like this? How cruel, calculating, feelingless? Comment on his change of attitudes and emotions for every situation? Was he a happy man? Did he feel anything towards Dixie Evans and murdering her? Comment on his reaction to Charlie's suicide?
12. Nick: as a picture of devotion to Charlie, the audience's possibility of identifying with Nick and friendship towards Charlie? His reaction to Charlie's death?
13. Budd: as an agent, as going to prison for Charlie, his relationship with his wife, the impact of his final disillusion scene with Charlie?
14. The sequence with Connie Bliss - what did it reveal, about her, as a Hollywood unhappy wife? Of Charlie playing up to her? Of her attitude especially about the accident and prison?
15. Dixie Evans: in herself, as a disillusioned starlet, drinking? Her attitude towards Stanley Roff? Her relationship with Charlie and her speech about the studio? As a victim of the studios, even to being murdered? The importance and irony of her accidental death?
16. Hank Teagle: his friendship with Charlie, his drinking, as a novelist with insights into human beings, his devotion to Marion? His coming to the support of Charlie, especially at the end?
17. Comment on the dramatic impact of the clashes between personalities in this film. What impact did they have?
18. Comment on the moral issues and values of the people in this film.
19. The impact of Charlie's death and its pessimistic outlook on human living, human personalities, their being crushed?
20. Was this an important film about Hollywood, about persons, about the world?
