Tag: Kirk Douglas
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Young Man with a Horn has a third act problem. It’s got too many of them as it tries to find a way not to end on a down note. As a result, each third act gets more depressing, more dire, and correspondingly adjusts the expected bounce-back. But Horn’s got a bookending device with co-star…
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Screenwriter Rod Serling really likes to employ monologues in Seven Days in May. John Frankenheimer likes to direct them too. And the actors like to give them. Because they’re good monologues. The monologues give all then actors fantastic material. Everyone except George Macready, who isn’t the right kind of scenery chewer for Seven Days. Maybe…
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Champion is a boxing picture. It ends with a big fight, as boxing pictures are wont to do. However, as the fight starts and the film cuts between all the people Kirk Douglas’s Champion has wrong, the film isn’t asking the viewer to root for the protagonist. Douglas is a bad guy. The entire third…
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Detective Story, the film, is William Wyler’s “production” of Sidney Kingsley’s play of the same title. Philip Yordan and Robert Wyler adapted the play. Wyler directed and produced the film. It is a stage adaptation and proud of it. The phrasing above is directly adapted from how the film opens and credits Wyler and Kingsley…
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Out of the Past always has at least two things going on at once. Not just the double crossings, which is so prevalent lead Robert Mitchum even taunts the bad guys with it, but how the film itself works. Daniel Mainwaring’s script–which gives Mitchum this lengthy narration over a flashback sequence–gives the impression of telling…
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Paths of Glory takes place over four days, runs just under ninety minutes and has thirteen or so significant characters. It’s hard to identify the most significant character–Kirk Douglas’s protagonist the viewer’s way into the film, but he’s not the most significant. The film opens with George Macready (who, along with Wayne Morris, is my…
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Ace in the Hole moves while the script–from director Wilder, Lesser Samuels and Walter Newman–never races. In fact, it’s deliberate and methodical, maybe even redundant at times (especially in the first act). The redundant moments aren’t actually a problem since Kirk Douglas is in almost every scene of the film and, even when he doesn’t…
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Greedy would be a mess if it weren’t so thoughtfully arranged. It’s not good, but it’s definitely intentional. The film opens with Ed Begley Jr. and his family–with Mary Ellen Trainor as his wife–going to his rich uncle’s house for a family gathering. There, the film introduces second-billed Kirk Douglas as the rich uncle and…
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Formulaic WWII thriller about Norwegian resistance fighters Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris infiltrating a Nazi base to stop them from developing the A-bomb first. Lots of good cross-country skiing footage, lots of reused war footage. Douglas doesn’t act very much in the first half, just gropes every woman in sight. Meanwhile Harris, who’s good in…
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