Word: knifings
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Shouted Playwright Clifford Odets, whose The Big Knife is doing a brisk business on Broadway: "I am proud to reach out and shake the hand of any man or woman who has the courage to appear here ... If I speak here Sunday, I may be without a job Monday. The country is a little in the state of unholy terror from coast to coast...
...Correspondent Morley Cassidy of the Philadelphia Bulletin reported last week from Stockholm: "It is beginning to seem awfully lonesome up here on the Baltic. Fingering its boy scout knife, Sweden is noticing that the woods all of a sudden seem to be getting terribly dark...
...Knife (by Clifford Odets; produced by Dwight Deere Wiman) is Odets' first play in seven years, and probably his poorest ever. A kind of savagely spluttering memoir of Hollywood, where Odets has spent most of those seven years, it is a lament for crushed ideals and identities, a screeching indictment of vicious methods and heartless men. Its anger is real; everything else about it is contrived...
...including a cynical hatchetman and a ruthless cinemagnate (well played by Paul Mc-Grath and J. Edward Bromberg) are vividly caught or caricatured. Now & then, along with some "poetic" writing that is as unpleasantly conspicuous as a nose ring, a lively crack comes forth. But most of The Big Knife is as unfocused as it is violent; it is full of curses not deep but loud, of intemperate and untidy theatrics. And Castle's particular predicament is far too unusual to mean anything. He is surely one of very few heroes in history-even Hollywood history-who have been...
Both too lurid and too grandiose, The Big Knife writes of lost idealists, in whom there was always something of the ham or the hack, as though they were fallen archangels. It stirs little real sympathy for them. Designed as scathing tragedy, it emerges as botched melodrama which often suggests an ugly farce...