Actor Kirk Douglas died yesterday at the age of 103, and if anyone can be said to have had a good run, it was Kirk Douglas. As the Associated Press obituary put it, his life spanned almost the entire history of the motion picture business. His profile in IMDB lists 95 acting credits for Douglas, the first one dating back to 1946. He was a three time Academy Award nominee, but never a winner, although he was given a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 1996.
I will only cite two of my favorite of Douglas' movies for this piece.
In Billy Wilder's 1951 "Ace in the Hole", Douglas played a reporter for a second rate newspaper who created what we would today call a "media circus" with tragic results when a man was trapped in a mine in a small backwater western town. Many film historians cite Douglas' role in this movie as a classic case of when the Oscars "got it wrong" by not even nominating Douglas for this great performance.
In "Seven Days in May" (1964; directed by John Frankenheimer), Douglas played a high ranking military officer who became aware of a military coup to overthrow the President that was being plotted by megalomaniac Army General Burt Lancaster. Douglas was torn between loyalty to his friend, or loyalty to the US Constitution. He was terrific in this one, as were Lancaster and Frederic March.
There are dozens of other great movies that comprise the legacy of Kirk Douglas - "Spartacus", "Gunfight at the OK Corral", "Lust for Life", and "Paths of Glory" to name only a few. However, one of Douglas greatest achievements was his willingness to stand up to the demagoguery that was McCarthyism and the shameful "Hollywood Black List" that it produced when he brought writer Dalton Trumbo out of the shadows of the blacklist, enlisted him to write the screenplay for "Spartacus" and gave Trumbo full on-screen credit for his work on that movie. Not an easy thing for a then young actor to have done in that day, and Douglas deserves credit for doing that, as much as for any performance he ever gave.
RIP Kirk Douglas.
Now THIS is what a Movie Star
should look like!
No comments:
Post a Comment