Happy 90th Birthday Kirk Douglas December 9, 2006
Posted by jackal in : Films , trackback
Nothing deeply intellectual or world-changing today (making a big change to my normal posts, I know 
). I just wanted to mark the fact that one of my favourite actors, also one of the few true “Hollywood Legends” still living, Mr Kirk Douglas, turns 90 today.
Douglas was one of the first “old time” Hollywood stars I grew to like as a kid: his sqaure-jawed heroics in films like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Spartacus, The Heroes of Telemark, innumerable westerns and *cough* The Light at the Edge of the World (a guilty favourite) were right up my street. I’m pretty sure that Tough Guys was my first encounter with Douglas though: with he and off-screen pal Burt Lancaster cast as 70-something gangsters just released from prison, trying comically to adjust to 1980s life. I haven’t seen it in years, and don’t imagine it’s as good as my childhood memories, but I really should check it out again.
Later, of course, I discovered much more of Douglas’ career: his early performances in film noir classics like Out of the Past and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, melodramas like The Bad and the Beautiful or Two Weeks in Another Town, and even a fun late-career turn in Brian De Palma’s The Fury.
Next spring, TCM stateside is due to show a restored print of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, hopefully indicating that a DVD release is on the cards. My New Year’s wish for 2007, though, is for Warner Bros to release Two Weeks in Another Town to DVD. The 1962 re-teaming of director Vincente Minnelli and star Douglas is one of my all-time favourites, and deserves so much more than the faded pan & scan TCM screenings which are its only outings at present.
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