Kirk Douglas

I Walk Alone

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Burt Lancaster as Frankie

Big acting is the offer in I Walk Alone, the first of many teamings for Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, and the first directorial effort by Byron Haskin, up till this point an effects guy. Haskin delivers nuanced, psychologically attuned drama while Lancaster and Douglas go at it like fighting dogs. The whole thing is great to watch and it’s easy to see why Scorsese is such a big fan (it marks a transition from one type of film-making to another, he says). The critics of the day were less enthusiastic. “Low grade of melodrama,” said the New York Times. “Dreary,” said the Chicago Tribune. Variety liked it, though. So let’s side with … Read more

In Harm’s Way

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Eddington and Annalee at the beach

Did the world need Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way in 1965? Does it need it now? After all if you’re in the market for a big, formless war movie shot in expensive-looking black and white and starring John Wayne, there is and was 1962’s The Longest Day. But Day was Europe and Way is the Pacific, the thinking obviously went. And so here we are. The action kicks off in Pearl Harbor on the evening before it’s bombed by the Japanese. By the end of the attack the film’s two main characters, heroic Captain Rock Torrey (John Wayne) and his no-less-courageous first officer Commander Paul Eddington (Kirk Douglas), have both been busted down … Read more

Champion

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Kirk Douglas in boxing pose

So here I am coincidentally writing about Champion on the day the death of the remarkable George Foreman is announced. A gent and a plugger, who came back after 20 years away to win the world boxing title for the second time, Foreman was everything the focus of Champion is not. The film made a star of Kirk Douglas, and was his eighth film in three years. In many ways the typical boxing drama – scrappy kid, rags to riches, it all goes to his head, a fight to be thrown, the against-the-odds finale etc – it’s also a portrait of a psychopath, or at least a sociopath, who has no use for … Read more

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

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Kirk Douglas and Barbara Stanwyck

What exactly is so strange about the love of Martha Ivers in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers? Unfortunate, maybe? Random, perhaps? Convenient, possibly? Strange – not so much. But then that is this noirish, gothic 1946 melodrama all over, promising much and not quite delivering. It’s largely remembered these days as the film debut of Kirk Douglas, who plays the husband of Barbara Stanwyck’s Martha Ivers, whose birth name was Smith, by the way, and whose married name is O’Neil, and so isn’t really an Ivers at all. But before all of that, first a preamble brilliantly setting the scene for what’s to follow. A young Martha (played winningly by Janis Wilson) is … Read more

Out of the Past

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Jeff and Kathie

You can run but you cannot hide is the sentiment driving Out of the Past, Jacques Tourneur’s bleak film noir masterclass from 1947. Just when you think you’ve got clear of something, so the story goes, up it comes from your history and bites you in the ass. Robert Mitchum plays Jeff, a private detective hired by a big “operator” to go and find the woman who’s run off with his $40,000. What Whit (Kirk Douglas) really wants back is the woman rather than the money, and when Jeff tracks her down in Acapulco he discovers why. Jeff, instantly smitten, does the thing a private eye shouldn’t do and, after trading dialogue that’s … Read more