as the camera pulls back and reveals we're watching her wails on a cinema screen. Cast Jack Palance as Charlie Castle Ida Lupino as Marion Castle Wendell Corey as Smiley Coy Jean Hagen as Connie Bliss Rod Steiger as Stanley Shriner Hoff Shelley Winters as Dixie Evans Ilka Chase as Patty Benedict Everett Sloane as Nat Danziger Wesley Addy as Horatio "Hank" Teagle Paul Langton as Buddy Bliss Nick Dennis as Mickey Feeney Bill Walker as Russell Michael Winkelman as Billy Castle Strother Martin as Stillman Production In March 1955 Aldrich signed a contract with Clifford Odets to make the film. A script by James Poe had already been written and Jack Palance set to star. The film was made for Aldrich's own company. Aldrich said he was "terribly ambivalent about the Hoff character". When he made the film many old time tycoons were still in power. We'd had twenty years of petty dictators running the industry, during which time everybody worked and everybody got paid, maybe not enough, but they weren't on relief. Seventeen years later you wonder if the industry is really more healthy in terms of creativity. Are we making more or better pictures without that central control? But when everybody worked under those guys, they hated them. So we took the drumroll from Nuremberg and put it under the Hoff character's entrances and exits. It wasn't too subtle... The Hoff crying came from Mayer, who is reported to have been able to cry at the drop of an option. But the big rebuff that Odets suffered was at the hands of Columbia, so there was more of Cohn in the original play than there was of Mayer. Aldrich later said he wished he and the writer had cut down Clifford Odets' play. "At the time, I thought that kind of theatrical flavoring was extraordinary. I'm afraid neither Jim Poe nor I were tough enough in editing some of Odets' phrases as we should have been." Reception Critical response New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, was disappointed and believed the plot lacked credibility. He wrote: Film critic Jeff Stafford analyzed some of the film's elements, and wrote: Pop culture writer Nathan Rabin stated that: The Big Knife is a film of excess. It's over-written, over-acted, overwrought and over-emotional. It's full of bombast and shouting and actorly monologues but the film has the courage of its convictions.