Straining Against Hollywood's Golden Handcuffs

Being a movie star these days definitely has its drawbacks. The paparazzi who swarm whenever you approach a Starbucks. The brutal scrutiny of those red-carpet choices. The tweet that never dies. But to my knowledge no current luminary has had to wrestle with a question of complicity in murder, the ugly problem facing Charlie Castle, the Hollywood star at the center of Clifford Odets's 1949 drama, "The Big Knife," which opened on Broadway at the American Airlines Theater on Tuesday night in a sluggish, soulless revival starring the talented Bobby Cannavale as the angst-eaten Charlie.The man is certainly no saint. He cheats on his wife as casually as he swills booze and flits around the backyard tennis court. He let a good friend take the rap and go to prisonafter Charlie accidentally killed a child while driving drunk.
But when the studio boss and his henchman begin to hint about arranging the death of the starlet who could expose the truth of that fatal night, Charlie's moral fiber, limp as overcooked spaghetti after years of self-indulgence, suddenly stiffens.First produced with John Garfield in the central role and Lee Strasberg directing, and later made into a movie with Jack Palance, "The Big Knife" works over themes that Odets explored with more cogency and urgency in his 2014 play, "Golden Boy," which was revived earlier this season in a propulsive production from Lincoln Center Theater.In that play, a young man from the rough streets of New York is torn between a lucrative career as a prizefighter and a desire to pursue his early dream of becoming a violinist. Here the conflict between the allure of worldly success and the deeper satisfactions of the soul is dramatized in the balmy climes of Hollywood during the heyday of the studio system, when big stars were held prison in their gilded cages by ironclad contracts.