Theatre in Review: The Big Knife (Roundabout Theatre Company/American Airlines Theatre)

	Chip Zien, Bobby Cannavale, Richard Kind, Reg Rogers. Photo: Joan Marcus

Among the many playwrights who have mined their self-hatred for their art, none ever did it quite so nakedly as Clifford Odets. As many noted when Golden Boy was revived earlier this season, Odets' tale of a gifted violinist turned boxer was a coded parable about himself, born out of his self-disgust for deserting the Group Theatre for the easy money of Hollywood. When, in 1949, he got around to writing about the film colony, he had been living there for years. It's impossible not to see Odets in his lead character, Charlie Castle, a movie star who hates his life yet can't cut loose from it. But the play's familiarity with the ways of movie folk did not yield a trenchant critique of their shabby morals. The Big Knife is a rather overwrought, self-important melodrama that takes aim at its target and misses.

Charlie is the most profitable star at Hoff Federated Pictures, churning out one idiotic melodrama after another; as his wife, Marion, notes, in his last ten pictures, he has been electrocuted four times. The result of this gilded slavery has been corrosive to Charlie's soul; no longer challenged by his work, he sleepwalks through one role after another, drowning his sorrows in whiskey or helping himself to the nearest starlet when the cameras are off. His contract is up and Marcus Hoff, the thuggish studio head, is dangling a new 14-year agreement that guarantees Charlie a million dollars, an amount not to be sneezed at in 1949. However, the only way Charlie can save his marriage is to flee Hollywood. But looming over the negotiation is the memory of a car accident, a couple of years earlier, in which a child was killed; the incident was hushed up, and Charlie's publicist, Buddy Bliss, spent a year in jail for it. But what really happened that night?

For all the time he spent in Hollywood, Odets had trouble getting the details right. The idea of a 14-year contract is a total contrivance; seven years was the norm and no sane representative would have advised his client to sign it, blackmail or not. Furthermore, at the time Odets wrote The Big Knife, most major stars were either becoming free agents or, like Humphrey Bogart and Burt Lancaster (either of whom could be seen as a prototype for Charlie), were setting up their own production companies. (A modern audience, gifted with hindsight, also knows that well before the contract was up, somewhere around 1962, the old studio system would be on life support; Hoff's lawyers would be looking for any way out of it they could find.)

Also, Odets' signature dialogue, those crackling assessments that sound so natural coming from the mouths of cynical, Depression-weary New Yorkers, have here lost their wiseacre snap, and are replaced by editorial pronouncements better fit for the op-ed page. "Free speech is the highest-priced luxury in this country today," Charlie says, going on to note that "the theatre is a stunted, bleeding stump." When Nat, his agent, says he only wants to live in peace and please his clients, Charlie snaps, "How do we know America isn't dying from trying to please its clients?" A little of this is enough to convince us that, trapped or not, Charlie is really an awfully big pill. Sometimes the dialogue is as overripe as a fruit bowl left in the sun. "You go on grieving for the past, like a weeping bird," Charlie tells Marion. "This whole movie thing is a murder of the people," he adds. No wonder Smiley, a sinister studio hack, brands Charlie "the warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope."

Some lines have the old, familiar tang of arsenic. A starlet who knows a little too much about that car accident is described by Smiley as being "all mouth and grab," a line worthy of Raymond Chandler. When the lady in question shows up at the Players' Bar, loaded and loquacious, Smiley adds, "A woman with six martinis can ruin a city." But everything is dragged down by the elaborate, overplotted scenario, which also includes an abortion, adultery, and a murder plot. As so many writers have attested, the luxuries of Hollywood were enough to petrify many great talents; it isn't necessary to turn the place into a gangster's den to make the point.

The script's many oracular pronouncements sound particularly unconvincing when being delivered by Bobby Cannavale. With his good looks and masculine presence, he should be thoroughly convincing as a movie idol caught on the spot, but somehow he never gets under Charlie's skin. It doesn't help that Odets stints on the details of Charlie's New York past, when he was allegedly happier, or that Charlie, with his constant vacillation and tendency to make blowhard statements, is so difficult to care about. In any case, the actor looks distinctly uncomfortable railing against his gilded cage.

Too many of The Big Knife's supporting characters are Johnny-one-notes, created merely to deliver plot information or add to Charlie's miseries. Still, some of them bite into Odets' lines with real zest. Leading the way is Richard Kind, as Hoff, wielding a tear-stained handkerchief like a maestro and launching into take-no-prisoners rants when double-crossed. Turning coy in a contract dispute, he offers his best Cheshire-cat smile and purrs, "I'm like a girl in a summertime canoe; I can't say no." Almost as good is Marin Ireland as Marion, Charlie's fed-up wife. "Why do you keep using words like 'ain't'?" she asks, nailing in one sentence how Charlie has confused his real self with his screen persona.

Also making solid contributions are Brenda Wehle, as a dyspeptic, Hedda Hopper-style columnist; Chip Zien, as the self-abasing Net, who suddenly, furiously, turns against his betters; Reg Rogers, as Smiley, whose cagey manner hides a multitude of crimes; and Ana Reeder, as a Hollywood wife who thinks marital vows are for saps. C. J. Wilson does all that can be done with the role of the saintly, recovering-alcoholic novelist who wants to rescue Marion from this nest of vipers.

The action unfolds on John Lee Beatty's stunning rendering of Charlie's "playroom," a true piece of mid-century Hollywood modernism with floor-to-ceiling windows and flagstone appointments. (Naturally, for a play in which no one is ever without a cocktail for long, the bar occupies stage center. The Rouault behind it rises up to reveal a movie projector for at-home screenings.) James F. Ingalls' lighting casts a pall of debilitatingly hot sunlight on the action. Catherine Zuber's costumes are perfect examples of the period, and of a community where people dress to be on display. David Van Tieghem's sound design includes some jazzy original music and an excerpt from the soundtrack of a Charlie Castle film, every cliché present and accounted for.

Still, there's no getting around the fact that what should be a crackling melodrama is sluggish and unconvincing. In denouncing a way of life, Odets allowed himself to become solemn and shrill. "Try to be happy. This isn't a Russian novel," Charlie says at one point. He's right; it's pure pulp fiction, with all the juicy fun strained out.--David Barbour