Last night Charles and I ran another episode of the CBS-TV series
Two Sharp Knives (1949) - Movie Moviefone Two Sharp Knives (1949) Not Yet Rated 59 min Nov 14th, 1949 A small-town police chief captures a man wanted for murder in Philadelphia. “Knives Out” (Lionsgate DVD, $29.95; Blu-ray, $39.99; 4K, $42.99; also available on VOD) Writer-director Rian Johnson and an all-star cast put a fun spin on an old-fashioned murder mystery in. Directed by Rian Johnson. With Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Jamie Lee Curtis. A detective investigates the death of a patriarch of an eccentric, combative family. Two Sharp Knives 1949 crime drama movie. Written by Dashiell Hammet the famous crime noir novel writer, adapted for the Studio One television program. RELATED: Knives Out: 10 Funniest Moments, Ranked. The all-star cast and witty humor make it a fun ride from beginning to end, but the brilliantly constructed mystery is what demands you watch the movie again. With plenty of fun hints and jokes, there's a lot to get out of repeat viewings. Here are some hidden details you missed in Knives Out.
Studio One, a much better show than There Was a Crooked Man: Two Sharp Knives, a 1949 adaptation of a 1934 short story by Dashiell Hammett (for some reason, the blacklist prevented him from doing new work for films or TV — not that given his long-term alcoholism he’d have been in much shape to do new work even if he’d been allowed to — but it did not prevent the networks from paying him for rights to his old stories and characters), though the publication of the story I read in the Hammett anthology Nightmare Town
must have been from a later edition since some of the dates were moved up to the 1940’s.It begins on a train — shown, given the limitations of live television, by a stock clip of a train which dissolves to a train interior but with blank spaces on the back wall where the windows are supposed to be (since there was no way in 1949 they could do the process-screen effect of scenery passing by one took for granted in the movies) showing a dapper-looking mystery man named Lester Furman, with a 10-year-old girl in tow. They’re on their way to the town of Deerwood, Pennsylvania to look for the man’s ex-wife — the girl’s mother — only as soon as he gets off the train he’s arrested on the basis of a wanted poster which claims he killed a man in Philadelphia named Paul Frank Dunlap, and before the night is over he’s found hanged in his cell. The coroner’s official verdict is suicide but he later tells the police chief, Scott Anderson (Stanley Ridges), that he only said that to cover for him in his political feud with district attorney Ted Carroll (Robert Emhardt), who’s trying to get Anderson fired and is using the death of a prisoner Anderson was responsible for as a political point against the chief.
What really
killed Furman was a blow to the back of his head from a blunt object, committed while the police officer that was supposed to be guarding him was asleep at his desk. The ex-wife, Ethel (Wynne Gibson, who had got a star buildup from RKO in the early 1930’s but never quite made it even though she certainly could act: here she delivers a strong, though occasionally overacted, performance), turns up and identifies the body but notes that the picture on the wanted poster was an old one, taken just before she married Furman a decade earlier, touched up to make him look 10 years older — confirming Anderson’s suspicions about the poster after he called the police in Philadelphia and found they had no record of the mysterious Paul Frank Dunlap actually having been murdered. It turns out the whole thing is a criminal scheme in which Ethel is involved, along with her boyfriend Bill and two other persons, an old crook and a hard-bitten blonde woman, and the purpose is to get their hands on Lester Furman’s $500,000 estate — and what makes this story unusual and provides the Hammett-esque twist at the end is that the mysterious “Bill” is actually Anderson’s deputy, Wally Stott, who was sent undercover to infiltrate a numbers racket in Detroit, met and started dating Ethel, and ultimately worked out this scheme with the members of the gang he was supposedly working undercover to bust to knock off her estranged but still legally married husband, make it look like suicide, marry her himself and split the fortune four ways.The other gang members plot to ambush Anderson in their hotel room — they think he and Wally will be the only cops there — but Anderson figures it out, realizing that the only person who could have murdered Furman without arousing (physically and mentally) the sleeping deputy was someone who had a perfectly normal reason to be in the jail, and who had access to a key that would allow him to let himself into Furman’s cell. The Hammett story was adapted by Carl Bixby and directed by Frank Schaffner — who, as Franklin J. Schaffner, would later helm such important high-quality feature films as The Best Man and Patton — and though he was hamstrung by the limitations of live TV (where, quite frankly, you were lucky if you got a picture at all; they generally used three cameras but quite often one camera went out in the middle of a telecast and the director had to improvise frantically to keep the show on the air with the remaining two) he tried to get the noir atmosphere important to filming Hammett; at one point, he shot Ethel Furman through the vertical rails of her hotel bed — an obvious visual quote from the famous scene at the end of The Maltese Falcon where the bars of the elevator gate are pulled closed in front of Mary Astor and symbolize the prison bars that will soon enclose her murderess character — and though the actors were not identified with their roles in the credits, this was nonetheless a generally well-acted TV episode, intelligently adapted by Bixby even though he made some curious changes to Hammett’s original.
In the story, which is told first-person by Anderson, Ethel Furman is a patsy rather than part of the plot — Wally is just courting her for her husband’s money but she’s genuinely in love with him and doesn’t realize that — and there is no daughter (in the story they had one, but she died in infancy, precipitating the breakup of the Furmans’ marriage), whereas Bixby quite powerfully uses the daughter to arouse guilt feelings in Ethel and lead her to confess to Anderson and name her co-conspirators. There aren’t any co-conspirators in the story; the plot is Wally’s own and he’s implementing it without help. There’s a hard-bitten blonde woman in the story but she’s just Ethel Furman’s traveling companion, not a part of the murder plot; and the faked wanted poster ostensibly comes from a private detective agency (whose head sees it and pronounces it a fake but quite a good one, done on their authentic letterhead) rather than the police department, but for the most part the story and the TV version track pretty closely, and in at least one respect the show improves on the story by making more of the political rivalry between the police chief and the D.A. — not surprising since Studio One had already done a TV version of Hammett’s novel The Glass Key, which focused on two equally corrupt factions (though one was posing as “reformers”) fighting over control of a major city. Two Sharp Knives
Sharp Knives Movie Cast
was an unusually well-done live TV show based on an obscure story by a major author, even though Bixby’s script omitted the philosophical tag that gave the piece its title: a (supposed) old proverb, “To a sharp knife comes a tough steak.”Brian Russell: Hey Sam! So we both saw Knives Out and I think we both liked it! Rian Johnson’s new whodunit rolicks along, and painted a smile across my face from beginning to end. The star-studded cast and beautiful sets made me feel like I’d entered old Hollywood in the best possible way. Craft at it’s finest, this turned-on-its-head homage to Agatha Christie follows a delicious Daniel Craig as master-sleuth Beniot Blanc, twisting and turning through the hysterically complicated plot. A death has occurred under mysterious circumstances, and we are on the ride in search of motives, alibis, and the truth!
Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) has made millions writing best-selling mysteries, and spoiled his family rotten along the way. They all consider themselves self-made success stories, and yet all leech off him like parasites. When Harlan dies Blanc is tasked with investigating the suspicious circumstances of his alleged suicide. He enlists Harlan’s nurse and confidant Marta Cabrera (the luminous Ana de Armas) as his “Watson.” Marta has been closest to Harlan in his final years and knows all the families dirty little secrets, and Blanc needs all the help he can get.
The investigation pushes and pulls us hither and thither, and this gives our quirky ensemble cast many opportunities to shine. Among Johnson’s oh-so-fun accomplishments here is both leaning into type, and casting far against type. Plummer, Don Johnson and Jamie Lee Curtis all feel perfect and lean into exactly what we expect of them. Craig, Toni Collette, and Michael Shannon play the polar opposite of their usual type.
Knives Down Movie
Sam Russell: Yes, every performance in this movie is incredible to watch on a moment to moment basis. I was trying to decide who was my favorite and I truly could not choose. I think the movie’s secret weapon is its ability to blend tones. It is both wildly silly and edge-of-your-seat tense all at once. This is true of the performances too. Craig as Blanc, who delivers his meticulously scripted dialogue with impressive grace, is basically Foghorn Leghorn-meets-Columbo. Much of the cast, especially Collette, is similarly absurd. But equally impressive are Ana de Armas as Marta and Lakeith Stanfield as Detective Elliot. These two are both grounding, naturalistic performances. Without them we would be lost in the chaos and unpleasantness of the Thrombey’s.
Marta is our protagonist, the mild mannered, good-hearted hero at the center of the mystery. Detective Elliot is the cop in charge of the investigation. It’s a more supporting role, but an important counterbalance to Blanc’s theatrics. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these two characters are people of color, outsiders to the Thrombey’s absurdly white, absurdly privileged existence. These two actors do the incredible and invisible work of playing real human beings amid this Clue board of lunatics.
BR: You are so right on all counts. One other performance worthy of note is Noah Segan as Trooper Wagner. As a Johnson regular all the way back to Brick, I have never really noticed him before, but his relatively small role shines here, giving us sublime moments of of comedy as he assists Blanc and Elliot with the investigation into the death of his hero.
SR: Yeah, I think it’s a testament to Johnson’s writing and direction that every single character shines, no matter how small the part.
Two Sharp Knives Movie
BR: Regarding the “absurdly white,” in other hands the racial commentary could have been heavy-handed and hollow but here it slithers and slides, both hysterically funny and pointedly real. Each Thrombey literally prefaces the mention of Marta with her South American country of origin. The problem is no one has paid enough attention to actually know where she is from … your Brazillian Nurse, Dad’s nurse from Uraguay, The Peruvian nurse, etc. As Blanc probes and prods, the rich Thrombey’s start to fray at the seems, revealing their true colors and fully baked-in entitlement. Silly turns serious, and serious turns absurd, but without ever feeling preachy or giving up the pure glee experienced by the audience.
SR: Yeah, I went in expecting a standard mystery thriller, I had no idea it would have so much social commentary. I totally agree that it’s not too heavy handed. It avoids a clean political moral-of-the-story, and opts to skewer class rather than party. The Trump supporting members of the family come across as ignorant assholes, but so does Harlan’s grandaughter Meg (Katherine Langford), a perpetual liberal arts student. At first it seems Meg is Marta’s only sincere ally in the Thrombey family, but as soon as her stake of Harlan’s fortune is threatened she betrays Marta, slyly threatening to have her mother deported. Apparently greed, selfishness, and racism are non-partisan.
BR: So true … assholes exist all around! And this movie never sits still on politics or any topic. The shifiting tones set it up to do things totally wierd and unexpected one after the other. We actually get a comical car chase in the middle of the mayhem as Marta attempts to outrun the police in her 175 horsepower Huyundai. This is not your grandmothers Agatha Christie.
SR: Yes, it’s a pretty mundane car chase by action movie standards, but the slow-going Huyundai is used to raise the stakes. Every scene, and most are basically just people talking to each other, has all the excitement of a setpiece. This movie is impeccably, thoughtfully crafted in all departments, and is a thoroughly entertaining and satisfying experience.
SR: I give Knives Out 10 donut holes out of 10 donuts.
BR: And I give it 10 knives out of 10 sharp objects. Go see this movie!