Kirk Douglas, WWII Navy vet, Hollywood star, dead at 103 "Navy Times editor’s note: Shortly after the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor in 1941 — and three years after he legally changed his name from Issur Danielovitch Demsky — Kirk Douglas enlisted in the Navy. He’d been toiling as an understudy to a stage manager, with his biggest (but brief) role that of a singing messenger boy. Many of his fellow thespians flocked to units that churned out military training films or entertained the troops, but Douglas had a different idea. “I felt a wave of patriotism and a wave of Jewishness about what was happening in Europe with Hitler,” he explained to Playbill in 1990. Anyone who has spent a day in the service knows, of course, that Douglas wasn’t sent to Europe to bomb Hitler’s Germany as an Army pilot — he failed the dexterity test — but instead he was ushered into the sea service and was sent to Notre Dame for his midshipmen course and then the Pacific Theater to drop depth charges on the Japanese. Some press accounts report that Ensign Douglas trained as an antisubmarine warfare communications and gunnery officer and was assigned to Patrol Craft 1137, a PC-146 (later Bluffton)-class sub chaser, but in his autobiographies he said he reported to PC-1139."
He was such a good actor that he had me really hating the slimy individual he played in "In Harm's Way"
****SPOILER**** Yeah he almost made you feel sorry about that absolutely sleazy character getting splashed later in the movie.
I liked him in Spartacus and Paths of Glory, and also The Heroes of Telemark. But the best film of his I have seen is Lonely Are the Brave; an astonishing film.
As the producer of Spartacus, Kirk Douglas risked his career to put the real name of the screenwriter in the movie credits. The writer, Dalton Trumbo, had been blacklisted during the hunt for Communists in the movie industry when he refused to testify for HUAC. A dark stain in American history. He was Spartacus in real life
He played the villain in the 1947 noir Out Of the Past in which Robert Mitchum played the lead. It was just his second film, apparently. I mention it because it is a TERRIFIC film and I highly recommend it.
I just had to post this one. The last and best scene from the movie "Paths of Glory". A bit long, but worth the watch.
Douglas must have been the last man standing from that era. He and Lancaster had a presence you don't see much anymore. Interesting how the leading men, who were almost always of a certain maturity, have been replaced by far more youthful characters. I struggle with the credibility when a chief of detectives character is under 30! Christopher Plummer, still with us and active at 91, wrote an excellent autobiography that describes the personalities of the old and new Hollywood as well as the theatre scene in New York and London.
It's often said to be a sign of ageing when the policemen appear to be getting younger, is it even more so when the fictional detectives do so? However there are some fictional detectives on screen these days that you wonder why they haven't been put out to grass years ago
Dave55 Atlanta, USA Patron New We still have Clint Yes, but he's just a baby in comparison. Not much older than me.
