Marion (Marin Ireland) and Charlie Castle (Bobby Cannavale) face some tough decisions about their future together in revival of THE BIG KNIFE (photo by Joan Marcus)
American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Through June 2, $42-$127
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org
Clifford Odets skewers Hollywood and the studio system in The Big Knife, a sharply drawn tale of greed, temptation, and ambition that ultimately dulls as it reaches its melodramatic conclusion. Bobby Cannavale stars as Charlie Castle, a studio-era B-movie star whose twelve-year contract with Hoff-Federated is up and who needs to decide whether he is going to sign on for another fourteen years. The strong first act focuses on Charlie’s relationship with his wife, Marion (Marin Ireland), who threatens to leave him if he signs, wanting the company out of their life. But studio head Marcus Hoff (Richard Kind) and his right-hand man, Smiley Coy (Reg Rogers), are essentially blackmailing Charlie, ready to tell the truth about a scandal they helped cover up that could ruin him. Meanwhile, gossip columnist Patty Benedict (Brenda Wehle) wants the inside scoop on the Castles’ potential divorce, Charlie’s fast-talking agent, Nat Danziger (Chip Zien), is caught in the middle, and family friend and writer Hank Teagle (C. J. Wilson) wants Marion if she leaves Charlie. “Well, get seven of Hollywood’s intellectual hillbillies at one nightclub table and you’re in titanic trouble,” Hank tells Marion. “Men of a thousand causes and quips, not one unpopular or human. And then to be so dull — success has made them all so dull.” In the second act, the play becomes repetitive and predictable, the characters less likable, and many of the situations less believable, taking twists and turns that grow frustrating. The Roundabout Theatre production — the first Broadway revival since the play’s 1949 debut on the Great White Way, directed by Lee Strasberg and starring John Garfield as Charlie (Robert Aldrich’s 1955 Silver Lion-winning film featured Jack Palance as Charlie, Ida Lupino as Marion, Rod Steiger as Hoff, Shelley Winters as Dixie, and Everett Sloane as Nat) — is less successful than Lincoln Center’s recent revival of Odets’s Golden Boy, which also deals with such themes as career ambition and artistic integrity. Fluidly directed by Doug Hughes (An Enemy of the People, Born Yesterday,), the show features a solid cast highlighted by Kind’s marvelous portrayal of the sleazy, powerful Hoff, from how he walks around with hunched shoulders to how he confidently relaxes in an armchair on John Lee Beatty’s lovely Beverly Hills living-room set. The Big Knife might lose its edge as it approaches its grand finale, but is has plenty of cutting moments as it asks the age-old question, What price Hollywood?
When we caught U2’s Vertigo Tour at the Garden in June 2006, we were up in the rafters, looking down at tiny dots that just happened to be drummer Larry Mullen Jr., bass player Adam Clayton, guitarist the Edge, and singer Bono. But the World’s Most Important Band is front and center for everyone to see in U2 3D, the first-ever full-length film shot in Digital 3-D, directed by Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington. Using as many as eighteen specially equipped digital cameras and recording decks, Owens, who has been U2’s visual content director since ZooTV, captures the Irish band during stadium shows in South America and Mexico, focusing on the March 1-2 concerts at Estadio la Plata in Buenos Aires. The new technology, previously used for sporting events, has a fascinating layered effect that sucks in viewers — yes, who are wearing special glasses (not unlike the specs Bono used to wear as the Fly) — placing them right in the middle of the action as the band powers through an exultant setlist that, if not quite ideal, includes “Vertigo,” “New Year’s Day,” and “Pride (In the Name of Love).” You can’t help but reach out for Bono as he seemingly jumps out of the screen while singing “Touch me” during “Beautiful Day,” and then you’ll swear he’s reaching out only to you when he stares into the camera during “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and promises to “wipe your tears away.” And when tens of thousands of fans all bop up and down in unison to “Where the Streets Have No Name,” forming a propulsive wave, you’ll feel a rush beneath your seat that moves up into your gut. Owens and Pellington (Arlington Road) incorporate the band’s hypertextual stage show into the new format, as digitized figures, words, symbols, and letters from the large screens behind the band seem to float right in front of your face. The concert footage is supplemented with extreme close-ups shot onstage without an audience, and the energy level severely drops at these times, although Mullen’s drum kit looks amazing in 3-D. As straight-ahead concert movies go, U2 3D is among the best ever made, a unique theatrical experience that will blow you away. U2 3D is screening in Dolby Digital 3-D at the Museum of the Moving Image on May 7 at 7:00 as part of the series “Play This Movie Loud!” and “Sonos and VEVO Present: The Director’s Studio” and will be preceded by a discussion with Pellington and chief curator David Schwartz.
Japanese genre king Takashi Miike, who has made more than one hundred films in his twenty-two-year career, outdoes himself in The Happiness of the Katakuris, an endlessly inventive tale of the Katakuris, a family that moves to the middle of nowhere to run a country inn. The only problem is that when guests finally arrive, they all end up dead — in bizarre, ridiculous ways — and the father decides to bury them instead of reporting the incidents, in order to protect the inn and the family’s future. Miike (Ichi The Killer, Audition, Thirteen Assassins) masterfully mixes comedy, romance, Claymation, music, murder, and mayhem in this enormously entertaining and highly original movie that is filled with a never-ending bag of surprises. The Happiness of the Katakuris is screening in a 35mm print May 7 at 8:15 as part of the IFC Center series “The Modern School of Film” and will be followed by a discussion with Brooklyn-based choreographer Mark Morris; the series continues May 9 with John M. Stahl’s 1945 melodrama Leave Her to Heaven, with Neil LaBute on hand to talk about it, May 13 with Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror and Bill T. Jones, and May 28 with Vittorio De Sica’s Miracle in Milan and Laurie Anderson.
