The full, scorching force of Palance’s fury is no joke.Īnd it becomes a liability. When he pins the captain with a wild-eyed stare and growls that if his battle plan endangers the lives of his men, “I’ll come back and take this grenade and shove it down your throat and pull the pin,” you believe him. In fact, Aldrich shoots him in such a manner-often in shadowy, tight close-ups-that if you were to watch his confrontations with Cooney on mute, you might well assume that Costa is the bad guy. Palance is terrifying in Attack in the same way he is in his villainous roles. But thanks to some stateside political shenanigans, there’s no removing Cooney from his dangerously powerful position. Unfortunately, his immediate superior, Captain Erskine Cooney (Eddie Albert), is weaselly and bungling in the opening scene we see his cowardice cost the lives of several men, and we soon learn that’s not the first time his poor decisions have come with a body count. He’s Lieutenant Joe Costa, the competent and well-liked leader of an American squad fighting in France in WWII. In Attack, Palance’s heroism is more traditional. Aldrich uses the juxtaposition between Palance’s persona and Charlie’s character to add depth to his portrait of a doomed man. He’s an active performer playing a passive character an actor of imposing strength rendered powerless. Even when another actor is commanding the scene (this is a film brimming with big performances), Aldrich keeps our attention on Palance’s visceral discomfort-so palpable in the way he writhes in almost physical pain as Steiger sears him with a fiery monologue, or fruitlessly tries to swat away the amorous advances of his friend’s wife (Jean Hagen). The Big Knife is based on a play by Clifford Odets, and Palance is, in a sense, on stage the whole time. He’s so nakedly vulnerable, you almost want to drape a coat over his shoulders and tell the cameraman to go pick on someone his own size. Other noir antiheroes-your Mitchums and Bogarts-emoted as little as possible, doing most of their acting with arched eyebrows and drawled witticisms the less they spoke, the less they’d give away. Because there is so much of him, it makes even more of an impact when he curls up in anguish, or paces his opulent living room in cornered-animal distress. In The Big Knife, it has the opposite effect. At 6’4”, his hulking frame was often used to add another layer of intimidation to his already threatening presence. By multiple measures, he’s not exactly worthy of our sympathy.Īnd yet he gets it, chiefly thanks to the acute physicality of Palance’s performance.
He’s imprisoned himself in his own gilded cage, and wrecked several other lives in the process. We can see that he’s an essentially decent man he’s kind to his wife, his friends and the people who work for him. The film is a noir, and Charlie is every inch the antihero. The drama of The Big Knife resides in the tortured contours of Palance’s face as he desperately searches for an escape from this impossible situation. The problem: Hoff has information on Charlie that could send him to jail, and has no qualms about using it. He’s yearning for a challenging project, and his beloved but estranged wife Marion (Ida Lupino)-fed up with seeing his soul eroded by the dross in which he’s been acting-has threatened to leave him once and for all if he signs the deal. The time has come for Charlie to sign a new seven-year contract. In The Big Knife, Palance is Charlie Castle, a successful Hollywood actor who stars in mindless crowd-pleasers for studio boss Stanley Hoff (played with typical scenery-chomping malice by Rod Steiger).
That’s what made these performances so interesting. Aside from his established villainous persona, Palance’s strikingly unusual features and disconcertingly intense manner meant that he was never going to be a traditional leading man. Later on, he was Dracula, Jack the Ripper, Attila the Hun, Jekyll and Hyde, the son of Genghis Khan, Beelzebub…nine times out of ten, if he showed up in a movie, it was not to bring the lead character flowers.Įarly in his career, however, Palance made three films with acclaimed director Robert Aldrich- The Big Knife (1955), Attack (1956) and Ten Seconds to Hell (1959)-in which he was the hero. He was Oscar-nominated for terrorizing Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear (1952) and Alan Ladd in Shane (1953). He nearly unleashed a plague upon the world in Panic in the Streets (1950). Over his half century in Hollywood, Jack Palance played villain after villain after villain.
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