about it. Nat Danzinger sees all the trouble and corruption and yet he just cannot help loving life and people.
Odets is bitter and he is not afraid to show it. He wants to present corruption and he does. Charlie Castle has not only sold his artistic ability for large checks for doing inferior but economically successful movies, but he has also let the producer convince him it was necessary for him to let someone else take the blame for a hit-and-run accident of which he was guilty. Nor is Charlie faithful to Marion, whom he truly loves.
In the treatment of a minor character, Dixie, by the studio and its executives, even going so far as the planning of lier* murder to prevent scandal, Odets goes even farther In his picture of how much people can be degraded in the blind pursuit of money.
There is little action in The Big Knife. …show more content…
He shows his approval through Hank, who immediately after Charlie’s death tells the studio publicity agent,
There will be no photographers, there will be no lies, no display. This is my friend's hour, not the nation's, not Hoff's. Your work is finished here. It won't be smooth, but I'll...I ’ll tell the story. He...killed himself---because that was the only way he could live. You don't recognize a final... a final act of. faith...when you see one. (147)
Odets could have done more with his material in The Big Knife, but as the popular approval which it received, as indicated by its first run and the fact it has recently been made into a movie, seems to show, it is a play with more than the critics gave it credit for at the time of its first appearance on the stage. If it seems overwrought, hollow, superficial, the fault lies partly in the fact that this is the kind of life Odets was trying to present.
References:
Odets, Clifford. The Big Knife. New York: Dramatist's Play Service
Odets is bitter and he is not afraid to show it. He wants to present corruption and he does. Charlie Castle has not only sold his artistic ability for large checks for doing inferior but economically successful movies, but he has also let the producer convince him it was necessary for him to let someone else take the blame for a hit-and-run accident of which he was guilty. Nor is Charlie faithful to Marion, whom he truly loves.
In the treatment of a minor character, Dixie, by the studio and its executives, even going so far as the planning of lier* murder to prevent scandal, Odets goes even farther In his picture of how much people can be degraded in the blind pursuit of money.
There is little action in The Big Knife. …show more content…
He shows his approval through Hank, who immediately after Charlie’s death tells the studio publicity agent,
There will be no photographers, there will be no lies, no display. This is my friend's hour, not the nation's, not Hoff's. Your work is finished here. It won't be smooth, but I'll...I ’ll tell the story. He...killed himself---because that was the only way he could live. You don't recognize a final... a final act of. faith...when you see one. (147)
Odets could have done more with his material in The Big Knife, but as the popular approval which it received, as indicated by its first run and the fact it has recently been made into a movie, seems to show, it is a play with more than the critics gave it credit for at the time of its first appearance on the stage. If it seems overwrought, hollow, superficial, the fault lies partly in the fact that this is the kind of life Odets was trying to present.
References:
Odets, Clifford. The Big Knife. New York: Dramatist's Play Service