To Absent Friends - Kirk Douglas

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!

Old Movie Review - "Ace in the Hole"

Regular readers are aware of the fact that I have been on a Billy Wilder kick in recent weeks after reading a biography of him during the summer. This quest was rewarded earlier this week, thanks to Turner Classic Movies and the great invention of this era, the DVR, when I watched Wilder's 1951 movie, "Ace in the Hole" starring Kirk Douglas and Jan Sterling.

In this movie, Douglas plays a many fired newspaper reporter who finds himself working for a paper in Albuquerque, NM. After a year of looking for a story that will get him out of the sticks and back in the big time, he stumbles upon a guy who has been trapped in a mine cave-in. This is his big chance. When he learns that it a relatively simple procedure would enable the rescuers to free the trapped guy within 24 hours, he manipulates a crooked sheriff and mine engineer into using an alternate rescue plan that would take six or seven days to release the guy. By doing this, he can manipulate and milk the story to his own advantage, drawing maximum attention to himself, of course.

This begins a huge media circus that soon careens completely out of control. This was Wilder's follow-up to his classic "Sunset Boulevard" and it was not well received by critics at the time. Perhaps they didn't like how Wilder held up the mirror before them. It was re-released under a different title, "The Big Carnival", and it still never took hold. It wasn't until many years after release, when it appeared on television and later on video and DVD that the movie came to be recognized as the gem that it is. Woody Allen, for example, considers this one of his all-time favorite movies.

As I said, this movie does not paint a flattering picture of the news media, and keep in mind that this movie was made in 1951, long before 24 cable news outlets - and not to mention Larry King! - made the idea of media circuses a common event. Wilder didn't know it then, but he was making a movie about O.J. Simpson, Jon Benet Ramsey, Lacey & Scott Peterson, and Michael Jackson, or anyone of dozens of stories we could all mention if we thought hard enough.

Kirk Douglas is great in this movie. One Internet source I found states that Douglas not winning an Oscar for this movie is a classic case of when the Oscars got it wrong. (In case you are wondering, Humphrey Bogart won that year for "The African Queen.") He is not a nice guy or a likable character, to say the least, but what a performance!

This movie also contains a classic Wilder line. When Douglas tells Jan Sterling, the wife of the trapped guy, to go to a prayer service because it will look good for the papers, she tells him "I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons." That's right up there with "it's the pictures that got small" in my book.

So, keep your eye out for "Ace in the Hole." It's a great movie.