Cliff Odets was one of the finest American playwrights of the 20th century and several of his plays have been adapted for the screen with varying results. This is one of the best. Odets made his name with the Group Theatre in the mid thirties where one of the actors was Jules Garfinckle. Hollywood knocked that out of him and he became John Garfield, in many ways the acting personification of Odets writing, raw, virile, coiled spring contained energy. So it was fitting that when Odets wrote a new play in 1949 Garfield played the lead on Broadway. Alas, I didn't see it but I can imagine how writer and actor combined perfectly. When Robert Aldrich came to make the film he tapped Jack Palance - an actor he worked with in back-to-back productions, this one and 'Attack' - for the Garfield role, a good choice as it's difficult to think of another actor of the time, with the possible exception of Charles Bronson who was still relatively unknown, who could bring the energy and self-disgust to the part of the stage actor who'd 'sold out' to Hollywood (for actor read writer, Odets himself deserted Broadway for Hollywood and lived to regret it) and can't walk away without paying the price in scandal. Aldrich surrounded Palance with an almost perfect cast. Ida Lupino was seldom better as Marion, the wife in love with her husband's integrity as much as with the man himself, Wendell Corey, never much more than a Johnny-One-Note actor lucked into a part - press agent Smiley Coy - that called for that very one note in his repertoire, Jean Hagan and Shelley Winters handled the Hollywood 'tramps' as well as any of their contemporaries would have done and Rod Steiger was nothing if not memorable as Stanley Shriner Hoff an amalgam of any movie moguls you care to think of from Harry Cohn to Louis B. Mayer. It's a great script laced with highly quotable lines and full of that Odets pizzaz.
Review of The Big Knife
