Streaming The Big Knife Online
Samedi, mars 27th, 2010 |
Streaming The Big Knife Online.
Movie Title: The Big Knife The Big Knife is available for streaming or downloading. |
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.
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.
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