Daily Archives: March 20, 2016

The Big Knife
Directed by Robert Aldrich
Written by James Poe from a play by Clifford Odets
1955/USA
The Associates & Aldrich Company
First viewing/Netflix rental

Smiley Coy: What do you think of women, kiddie?
Charlie Castle: Oh, there’s room in the world for ’em.

This is a Hollywood expose along the lines of Sunset Blvd. or The Bad and the Beautiful. Unfortunately, it lacks the former’s black humor or the latter’s production values and is an over-the-top mess.

Charlie Castle (Jack Palance) is a big movie star.  In his past life, he was a fiery idealist and theater actor.  His wife, Marion (Ida Lupino), is disgusted with him and wants him to leave the studio.  She is already living apart from him and threatens a divorce if he continues with his life style, which also includes numerous affairs.

Charlie has a problem though.  Ruthless studio head Stanley Shriner Hoff (Rod Steiger) is pressuring him to sign up for another seven years.  He makes Charlie an offer he can’t refuse when he threatens to reveal that Charlie was the driver in a hit-and-run collision with a child, a deed for which another man took the rap.  Hoff also knows that Charlie was accompanied by starlet Dixie Evans (Shelley Winters) at the time, something that Marion is not yet aware of.

I will not reveal all the twists and turns of the plot except to note that we get a couple of different women attempting seduction by means of blackmail and a murder conspiracy.  With Wendell Corey as Hoff’s right-hand man, Jean Hagen as a would-be adulteress, and Edward Everett Sloane as Charlie’s agent.

The dialogue is overwritten in the way that characterizes many films based on plays by Odets.  The story is too full of incidents for the time allotted and the ending leapt out at me from left field.  Finally, Rod Steiger hams it up ludicrously.  His bleached hair and hearing aid do not help.  The title led me to expect a film noir but I got an overblown melodrama instead.

Trailer

A Generation (Pokolenie)
Directed by Andrzej Wajda
Written by Bohan Czeszko from his novel
1955/Poland
Zespol Filmowy “Kadr”
First viewing/Hulu

[box] When a film is created, it is created in a language, which is not only about words, but also the way that very language encodes our perception of the world, our understanding of it. — Andrzej Wajda[/box]

Despite some evident propaganda obligations, Wajda reveals his mastery of the medium in his first feature film.

The setting is occupied Warsaw.  Stach Mazur lives in a slum bordering on the Jewish Ghetto.  He has launched his personal resistance against the Nazis by stealing coal from boxcars headed for Germany.  One day, he is spotted.  His comrades are killed and he is wounded.  He flees to a workingman’s pub.  The denizens, impressed by his courage, offer to get him a job.

Stach reports to work at a company that makes bunkbeds for German barracks.  He is the low man on the totem poll and worked inhumanely.  A workmate lectures him on the teachings of Karl Marx and the duty of workers to fight for their rights.  He puts Stach in touch with Dorota, a young woman who organizes a Communist youth militia.

The rest of the film follows the battles of the youth brigade with the Nazis.  Among other things, the young people support the uprising in the Ghetto.  Along the way, Stach falls in love with Dorota.  With a very young Roman Polanski as one of the partisans.

Wadja manages to combine beautiful composition with a brisk pace.  The story is kind of predictable but I was engrossed the whole time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVedEkQIXLU

Clip – wow