The Big Knife

…in 1955 its first film, The Big Knife, was released. Based on a play by Clifford Odets, this scathing look at the moviemaking industry offers a memorable group of loathsome producers, egomaniacal actors, spineless agents, betrayed wives, and amoral starlets as embodied by Rod Steiger, Jack Palance, Ida Lupino,

…she played a sadistic warden; The Big Knife (1955), an adaptation of Clifford Odets’s play, with Lupino as the wife of a cheating actor; and While the City Sleeps (1956), Fritz Lang’s crime drama about a serial killer. Lupino was a star (1953–56) of the dramatic television anthology Four Star…

…a tyrannical film producer in The Big Knife (1955); a haunted survivor of the Holocaust in The Pawnbroker (1964), the role he considered his finest and one that gained him a second Oscar nomination, this time for best actor; the outrageous undertaker Mr. Joyboy in The Loved One (1965); and…