SnoopyStyle Charles Castle (Jack Palance) is a successful top Hollywood actor. His wife Marion (Ida Lupino) is about to leave him. She is idealistic and wants him to stop making trash movies. He tries to do what she wants and refuses to renew his contract angering studio boss Stanley Shriner Hoff (Rod Steiger). Smiley Coy had covered up Castle's hit and run and Hoff uses the incident to blackmail him to sign a new 7 year contract. Charles struggles as his dark secret comes back to haunt him when hungry actress Dixie Evans (Shelley Winters) threatens to reveal it.It's Hollywood at its sleaziest. I just have a problem with Jack Palance as the 'Artist'. He is a stiff actor with a limited range and can't convince me otherwise. He's great at what he does but I can't buy him as the tortured artist. It just takes me out of the movie. Shelley Winters is terrific but otherwise the movie is filled with overacting.

secondtake The Big Knife (1955)You always expect something edgy and a hair impolite with a Robert Aldrich film, from his over-the-top film noir cult classic "Detour" to the bizarre and gripping "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" It's almost as though his rich upbringing and rejection of a nice political life made him a fearless renegade. Give him credit. He cracked the Hollywood doldrums of the 1950s and early 60s like few other directors (Kubrick comes to mind as a big budget parallel). So you can get a lot out of "The Big Knife" in understanding Aldrich. And you can really enjoy a superb set of performances, mainly by Ida Lupino as the leading man's wife, and by Everett Sloan in an aging version of his usual submissive chumminess. Rod Steiger is there, powerful and a bit overacted, if you can overact in an Aldrich movie, and the headliner, Jack Palance, does his best at being a leading man, and is pretty fine, especially since his role is as a Hollywood actor with flaws.Throw in some really crisp cinematography by Ernest Lazlo, one of the best of his generation. Sometimes the camera will take on an angle that rocks you slightly, as when it is looking up from the floor at Palance on the massage table, with his agent towering overhead. More subtle is Lazlo's fluid long takes, or even fluid short takes, where the camera just makes sense of a scene not by framing it right (which is expected) but by moving it during the take. Once you notice it, you appreciate more and more how the interior of this house (the set for the whole movie) is made dimensional and alive.I say all this up front because the movie struggles against the story and writing despite all this. It's a play adapted to the screen, but rather literally, with the one main set for all the shooting. And it talks a lot. I don't see this working even on a stage, where you want and get dialog. Here it's almost deadening. Not that it quite is ever boring, but it tries too hard, and it pulls a couple of sensational twists out as it goes, with another sensational twist at the end. On top of all that is just a level of credibility. None of these Hollywood businessmen strike you as quite right, and what they say or do is all caricature.Not that we expect a movie, especially an Aldrich movie, to be believable. But there has to be some compensating excitement. This one, with a great noir title but no real noir qualities, never quite flies. It's worth watching if you like Lupino or Aldrich in particular, and it has moments of real intensity, but that might not be enough in the big picture.

MarieGabrielle Clifford Odets covers it all here, with some memorable performances by Ida Lupino, Rod Steiger, Wendell Corey as studio PR and bag man "Smiley Coy". Jack Palance as the principal character, a troubled leading man Charlie "Cas" Castle, who is trying to maintain vestiges of his ethics and values in a soul-less profession. Also a few good cameos with Shelley Winters as the scandal scapegoat, and an annoying histrionic performance with a drunk Jean Hagen attempting to seduce Palance.Lupino is Castle's estranged wife, who wants him back if he will not sell his soul to the studio. There are some memorable scenes with her as the grounded spouse, seeing Castle destroyed by the system, and trying to pull him out of the mire. Hollywood in those times was something not easily detached from, as Castle is a major star and studio head "Uncle Hoff". Rod Steiger excels here in that role as narcissistic tyrant Hof. His monologue regarding his wife, her illnesses and survival of the fittest in Hollywood is indelible, and rings true.Lupino and Steiger alone can dominate the scenery, as she glowers at him while he is lecturing Castle. While a bit talky at times, the subject of stardom and Hollywood of those times is intriguing. As Marilyn Monroe once said, ..."Hollywood is a town where they give you a million for your body and a nickel for your soul"... Classic. 9/10.

vocalistbob I've tried to watch this film 3 or 4 times, but I just can't get past the fact that everything about it is just awful. I'm sure it was a courageous move by somebody to cast Jack Palance as the protagonist, but there is not one single fiber of my being that believes that he could act at all, much less act against type.Yes, I understand that Clifford Odets was a brilliant author, but it's not evident here. This odd and forced mish-mash of 50's hipster dialog seems to obfuscate any genuine meaning, which explains why none of the actors, even the good ones (Steiger, Ida Lupino, Shelly Winters, Everett Sloane) seems to know how to deliver their lines - it's as though they don't understand the meaning of what they are saying. And in the meantime, Wendell Corey and Palance stage a terrific contest to see who can be more stone-faced.The direction is amateurish and completely overwrought. The physical interaction between the characters is as stilted as the dialog.And can we discuss that hideous set? It's so busy, ugly and contrived that it adds to the robotic, disconnected quality of the characters, the dialog and the portrayals.This film seems to suck the energy right out of me. It looks like everybody took an overdose of Valium each morning when they arrived on the set. It takes a pretty lousy movie to make Rod Steiger and Shelly Winters look bad, but this one succeeds.I can see that it might have been effective as a play on or off Broadway, where intellectuals and beats could have congratulated themselves for appreciating the power of the plot and the artsy flourishes of the pseudo-hip dialog.