(3 of 4)
The story bears a vague, uncomfortable resemblance to Odets' own, and though no names are named, a lot of famous ears are already tingling. The hero (Jack Palance) is a prominent movie star with a career "out of the storybooks" and a bracing regimen of "health, hard work, rare roast beef and good scripts," but somehow he cannot content himself with life among the movie idles. The trouble is that he once had "idealism"—a quality that seems to have involved, as far as Odets is concerned, being out of a job and bitter about it—but he sold his ideals when he went to Hollywood, or so he feels, for the mess of modernistic pottage he lives in, and the inalienable right to Swedish massage. Now his wife (Ida Lupino) is leaving him, his contract is coming up for renewal, and he is beginning to feel like a spiritual gelding—"one of those witless, sold-out guys, sitting around the gin table, swapping phone numbers and the latest dirt."
Next cliché: he decides to quit, go back to New York, find a play he believes in, recover his self-respect. Enter the Big Producer (Rod Steiger), who would be the silliest ogre since Jack and the Beanstalk if he were not at the same time a frighteningly close caricature of a well-known Hollywood type—the self-made magnate who demonstrates in his person, as Fred Allen once remarked, "the horrors, of unskilled labor." Producer lays it on the line: sign the contract or go to jail (for the hit-and-run killing of a girl, committed while the star was driving drunk—a rap that was taken for him by a studio flunkey). Star signs.
Down and down he goes after that, saucing up all day and bedding down at night with his friends' wives, until one day the studio hatchet man (Wendell Corey) drops in "to throw the raw meat on the floor." The girl (Shelley Winters), who was with the star on the night of his accident, has been drinking fast and talking loose. "She's dishonest," somebody remarks. "She won't stay bought." The hatchet man concludes: "She'll have to be removed." Murder, however, is too rich for the star's blood. He lets the producer know that if anybody is killed he will spill his guts to the police. In a rage, the producer fires him. Free at last, but with no strength left to face his freedom, the star commits suicide.
The Big Knife, from first frame to last, arches with tension like a drawn bow. The Odets script, adapted for the screen by James Poe, has been beautifully grained and shaped by two fine craftsmen, and it takes every ounce of strain that Producer-Director Robert Aldrich leans against it. Aldrich gets striking performances from his actors. Jack Palance, a gifted portrayer of brute instinct, is miscast as a man whose problem is the loss of his instincts, but his intensity and sincerity propel the action vigorously even where they confuse its motives. Ida Lupino, as always, is a capable trouper; Shelley Winters makes an amusing roundheel: and Jean Hagen gives her some tart competition. Perhaps best of all is Wendell Corey as the sort of operator who has long since opened his veins, let out all the poetry and filled up with Prestone for life's long winter.