By David Hudson
Translator: Issac
Proofreader: Onegin
Source: Standard Collection
At this year's Oscars, the lights dimmed and the annual "memorial service" began, and Kirk Douglas's matchless face finally appeared on the big screen.
Douglas, who died last week at the age of 103, has appeared in more than 80 films in his 60 years since he worked, and the incomplete list of directors he has worked with reads even like a list of top geniuses from the second half of Hollywood's Golden Age: Robert Aldridge, Michael Curtis, Stanley Donan, John Frankheimer, Howard Hawkes, John Houston, Ilya Kazan, Joseph C. Lee, and others. L. Mankiewicz, Otto Preminger, Jacques Turner, William Wheeler, and most memorably Billy Wilder, Vincent Minnelli, and Stanley Kubrick.
Kirk Douglas
In 2014, we released Wilder's Ace of Inverted Buckles (1951), in which Guy Martin described Douglas in an essay, "His body always seemed to be made up of a series of triangles, and his face revealed a passionate and undisguised emotion, and his voice, intermittently conveying more and more intense pain, you always know, what you will get, but always much better than you expected." 」 With his experience as an acrobat, Bert Lancaster was probably the most physically fit of his generation, Robert Ryan was the weirdest, Robert Mitchum was the most sleepy, Charlton Heston was the most convincing and confusing, but on facial expressions, kirk won the title with ease." According to Richard Brody of The New Yorker, "No actor in Hollywood has lines as fluid, surprising, novel, and memorable as Kirk's; they go deep into the mind."
The Ace of the Upside Down (1951)
Douglas's parents were immigrants from a patch of soil in the Russian Empire, later Belarus, who was born is Isur Danielovich, born in Amsterdam, New York, and then raised here under the name of Iz Demsky.
"My father used to be in the Russian trade as a horse dealer, had a horse and a pickup truck, and then he became a scavenger, buying some worn-out clothes, scraps of iron and scrap to earn a few pieces of silver," Douglas wrote in his 1988 autobiography, The Ragman's Son. And I'm the son of a scavenger."
Walking to school, he writes, was like a challenge because he was dodging a bunch of boys wandering around desperate to beat him up as a Jewish child. Over the years, he has become increasingly intolerant of injustice and has produced a deep-seated anger that has never gone away.
David Volpe, a rabbi at The Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, recalls in The New York Times the days he spent studying with Douglas, "furious with anti-Semitism, toward the government, with Israel and Palestine, and with what he dislikes in Jewish law."
The young Douglas starred in plays in high school, earned a living by odd jobs in college, and later entered the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. There, he became good friends with Lauren Baikall. During World War II, Douglas served as a communications officer in the Navy. After this, Bai Kaul introduced him to producer Hal Colle. B. Wallis. Wallis put him on a rivalry with Barbara Stanwick in Strange Love (1946).
Strange Love (1946)
Lee Surf described it this way in See and Hear as a "creepy black melodrama full of lust, corruption, bad memories and murder," And Robert Burkwest of The New York Times quoted Douglas in a 1984 interview: "I was always drawn to characters who were somewhat rogue. I don't think virtue is photogenic."
Douglas then played a gang member in Turner's Beyond the Vortex (1947). When Roger Ebert revisited the film in 2004, he called it "the greatest of all film noirs."
In an earlier commentary, Ebert noted, "There are guns in Beyond the Whirlpool, but it's when Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoke face to face that the audience feels real hostility."
Beyond the Whirlpool (1947)
He played a number of roles before Mark Robson's "Winning the Crown" (1949) made Douglas a star. Stephanie Zakrick of Time magazine wrote that the boxer he played had an irrepressible desire and no scruples, "As the type of man who would never be loved by a woman in real life, Douglas's Midy Kelly was perfect." His lean figure and Pompadour hairstyle are part of his indescribable masculinity. Especially in all the articles about the male gaze in movies, we pay little attention to the way movies objectify men, and Douglas actually made for materialization."
But in real life, the women did fall in love with Douglas. There are many such women. A few years ago, Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker that he found Son of the Scavengers "exhausting to read." All the fights, the quarrels, the struggles, the series of carnal conquests and contractual conflicts: the unbridled carnival begins early and never subsides." In Joseph McBride's 1976 biography of Douglas, the title of the introduction is simple: "The Fighter."
Molly Haskell also wrote an article for Backgammon, in which she wrote that Douglas "plays Chuck Tetum, an exaggerated, masochistic performance, an unbiased journalist (lying, fabrication, adultery, etc.), desperate for exclusive news and a chance to return to the big city newspaper." He ended up stranded in a small rural town in Albuquerque." Vanessa Thorpe of The Guardian believes that "Backstabbed Ace" remains "the best film to date about journalistic ethics".
Minnelli's The Jade Woman (1952) "was the greatest film about classic Hollywood during the classic Hollywood era," said Owen Graberman of Variety. Douglas's "filmmaker Jonathan Shields will stop at nothing to seduce and manipulate anyone to get what he wants, but Douglas plays the role of a tough guy who is both cold and romantic." Minnelly and Douglas collaborated again in 1956's Biography of Van Gogh, "an old-fashioned, rather outdated biopic in many ways, and Van Gogh as an artist now looks more modern than the film itself," Grebermann wrote. "Douglas, however, threw himself into the role as if he had forgotten himself completely."
By then, Douglas had followed the example of Bert Lancaster and had set up his own production company, the Bryninger Productions, which bore his mother's name. He took the script for "The Glorious Road" and approached young director Stanley Kubrick and his partner, producer James C. Bush. B. Harris, a fiercely anti-war film about World War I, in which three French soldiers are pushed out to stand a military trial for collectively failing to complete an impossible task.
Kubrick and Harris had trouble starting the project, but Douglas, who promised to collaborate on the production, joined the project and, most importantly, starred in the film. In our 2010 essay, James Naremore noted that there was "a productive conflict" between Douglas and Kubrick, but in the end, "they shaped a dark, disturbing film in which Douglas acted as a voice of reason and liberal humanism, reconciling Kubrick's harsh, traumatic view of European history."
The Glorious Road (1957)
The 1957 film Road to Glory barely broke even, but Douglas approached Kubrick three years later because he fired director Anthony Mann during the filming of Spartacus (1960). Douglas decided to star in the epic film with swords and sandals, in which he played a gladiator who led slaves against the Roman Empire.
William Wheeler, who had directed Douglas's The Great Detective Story (1951), missed him, eventually charlton Heston starred in Ben Hurst (1959). Spartacus not only brings us one of the most frequently quoted (and occasionally parodyed) scenes — "I am Spartacus!" — Also received some praise for ending the Hollywood blacklist. To put it off, Douglas and Otto Preminger, who was working on Exodus (1960), insisted that Dalton Trumbo was one of the first hollywood top ten screenwriters.
Spartacus (1960)
According to Andrew Pulver of The Guardian, Spartacus was "a clear statement that any society based on slavery is inherently decaying and leads to its own decline." At a time when it was still apartheid, the film was powerful." Douglas and Trumbo worked together again in The Lonely Hero of Antiquity (1962), in which Douglas plays a cowboy, a loner who travels through time and space, who roams the western part of contemporary America on horseback.
The film is not only Douglas's favorite, but also the favorite of National Public Radio's Scott Simon. After Douglas's death, Simon reread the telegram that Trumbo sent to Douglas after the first screening. Trumbo's words "may be the best compliment to an actor's career," Simon wrote. "I think they'll leave the theater saying, 'That's how I was.' Or at least that's what I want at my best." You did it. You show a manly heart." 」
How Lonely Heroes Are From Ancient Times (1962)
With the rise of New Hollywood in the 1970s, Douglas's starlight began to fade, and by the '80s, his glow was replaced by his son Michael Douglas. But look at a clip of Dick Cavett's 1992 interview with Kirk Douglas and you'll see that Douglas is incredibly proud of his son. Michael has won two Oscars, while Kirk has been nominated three times and has not won an award once. In 1996, just two months after a stroke temporarily rendered him incapacitated, he received the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
A few years later, rumors began to circulate that Glass had raped Natalie Wood when she was 16 years old. These claims have never been confirmed, and as Angelica Jed Bastin wrote in Vulture magazine, we "may never be able to determine how or whether Douglas was related to Wood's life." Still, their stories are so intertwined in our contemporary conversations that they reflect how our understanding of stars has changed. Douglas's fearless power and majestic manhood on and off the screen are slowly becoming obsolete."
In the last years of Douglas's life, he and his wife, Anne, spent most of their time in philanthropy, donating money to schools and hospitals, and building and rebuilding playgrounds in Los Angeles and Jerusalem. "He is a legend to the world," Michael Douglas wrote in his father's death announcement last week, "he was an actor in the golden age of cinema, all the way to his own golden age, a humanitarian who devoted himself to justice and the cause he believed in, and he set a standard that we all aspired to aspire to."