TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife (1955), with Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Wendell Corey, Shelly Winters, Rod Steiger, Jean Hagen, Everett Sloane, Wesley Addy and Paul Langton

By David in TN
friday, april 26, 2024 at 6:04:00 p.m. edt

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife (1955) with Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Wendell Corey, Shelly Winters, Rod Steiger, Jean Hagen, Everett Sloane, Wesley Addy and Paul Langton.

Film Noir Guide: “Palance, a popular Hollywood star, wants to quit the business to save his crumbling marriage to Lupino, but ruthless producer Steiger and his henchman Corey blackmail him into signing a new seven-year contract. With a possible jail sentence hanging over Palance’s head if it becomes known that the studio P.R. man (Langton) took the blame for his drunk driving accident, which killed a young girl the actor gives in to Steiger’s demands.”

“Lupino, who’s considering running off with Palance’s best friend (Addy), isn’t thrilled with the prospect of seven more years in Tinseltown. Complicating matters, a dipso bit player (Winters), who was in the car with Palance on the night of the accident, has been babbling about the cover-up. When Corey decides that she should be shut up for good, the horrified actor feels he must take a stand.”

“Hagen plays Langton’s libidinous wife, who can’t resist Palance, and Sloane is the actor’s sympathetic agent. Steiger gives his usual boisterous but enjoyable performance, and Palance is so compelling that noir icon Lupino is hardly noticeable as his indecisive wife.”

“Based on the play by Clifford Odets, The Big Knife presents a grim look at the darker (albeit fictional) side of Hollywood life. The film wasn’t a big hit with audiences, who couldn’t drum up much sympathy for the pathetic life of an alcoholic, millionaire actor living in a Bel Air mansion. They also had difficulty accepting the hard-featured Palance as a sex symbol adored by millions of women.”

N.S.: I saw this picture over 50 years ago, and all I can remember of it is the ruthless studio mogul played by Rod Steiger, and yet I heartily recommend it. Why? It was helmed by Robert Aldrich, and has a brilliant cast.

Aldrich’s movies (Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, The Dirty Dozen, The Longest Yard, etc.) were characterized by brutality and intelligence. The story goes that as he lay on his death bed, when one of his friends asked, “Can we get you anything, Bob?,” he responded, “A good script.” He worked frequently with Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine and, late in his career, Burt Reynolds.

Rod Steiger’s studio mogul, as I remember him, mixed with voluminous reading on the topic, is generic. However, people who have read very little on the topic, will simply project their personal hatreds on him. The other day, I visited an old web page from a movie blog, where one such denizen cursed the memory of MGM founder Louis B. Mayer. Others will curse Columbia co-founder Harry Cohn. Or Warner Brothers chief Jack Warner. Or 20th Century Fox founder Darryl F. Zanuck. Steiger won one Oscar, out of three nominations, for Best Actor, for In the Heat of the Night (1967).

Jack Palance was up for Best Supporting Actor three times, most famously as two-pistoled hired gun Jack Wilson in George Stevens’ Shane (1953). Palance won his Oscar for City Slickers (1991).

Shelley Winters was up for six Oscars and won two (for a layered performance in which she stole the show, in The Diary of Anne Frank, 1959, and for an over-the-top one as a prostitute and racist mother-from-hell, in A Patch of Blue, 1965, with the star-crossed Elizabeth Hartman), shares the top spot on my list of the greatest movie character actresses with Claire Trevor, who was up for three Oscars, and who won one as a gangster’s moll (in Key Largo, 1948).

Wendell Corey was a natural, who never seemed to play too high or too low. Unfortunately, he drank himself to death in his early fifties. The best directors always wanted him around (e.g., Hitchcock in Rear Window, 1954).

Jean Hagen is most famous for playing the silent movie queen with the voice that is unfit for sound in Singin’ in the Rain (1954), which got her her one nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Early in her movie career, she delivered a series of brilliant supporting performances (e.g., Side Street, 1949). Although she got the role as the wife on The Danny Thomas Show, which fetched her three Emmy nominations, she quit after three years, complaining that there was nothing for her to do on the show. For several years thereafter, she was a busy TV guest star. And then her world fell in. Although she was still relatively young, her health completely collapsed, with one physical complaint after another, ending with death from esophageal cancer at the age of 54 (1923-1977).

Everett Sloane is most famous as one of the triumvirate who all should have been up for Best Supporting Actor for Citizen Kane (1941)—King Cotten, George Colouris, and Sloane—none of whom was nominated. In middle age, with his hearing failing him, Sloane committed suicide.

Ida “Crashout” Lupino was a whirlwind of talent. She started out at Warner Brothers, but got tired of waiting in line behind Queen Bette Davis, Olivia DeHavilland, and Ann Sheridan for good roles. Warners eventually released her to sign at RKO, which paid less, but let her do just about everything—write, direct, and produce, in addition to acting—in its cheapo productions. Lupino was never nominated for anything, not even for High Sierra (1941). When RKO went out of business, thanks to Howard Hughes’ mix of viciousness and incompetence, she busied herself with tv work, including a great deal of directing of episodic TV. As a no-nonsense director, she got episodes done on time and under budget.