The “brutal” director Kirk Douglas accused of getting “sexual glee” from nearly killing a stuntman
Plenty of directors have been accused of getting off on violence, but not literally. However, Kirk Douglas was adamant that one of the many storied ‘Golden Age’ filmmakers he worked with genuinely drew enormous sexual satisfaction from almost killing their crew.
That’s a hell of an accusation to make, but he had his reasons. As both an A-list actor and a successful producer, Douglas spent most of his career surrounded by the biggest names in the business on either side of the camera, and it also exposed him to the machinations of the industry’s power players.
Unsurprisingly, there were some people he didn’t like. Richard Harris was one of the most notable, with the brash upstart going out of his way to piss off the Spartacus star in a dick-measuring contest that almost derailed the entire production. Speaking of the 1960 classic, he had his issues with Stanley Kubrick, too, which included calling the seminal auteur a “bastard”.
In the early 1950s, the old studio system was still in full swing, which meant that actors were effectively told by the boardroom which films they’d be starring in. As a result, Douglas was cast in the leading role of a production he never wanted to make, helmed by a director he never wanted to meet again.
“I hated the next Warner Brothers picture I worked on, Along the Great Divide,” he wrote in his autobiography, The Ragman’s Son. “I did it just to get my one picture a year obligation out of the way, so I wouldn’t be tied up. We shot it in the Mojave Desert and in the High Sierra country around Lone Pine, California, that director Raoul Walsh liked so much.”
Walsh was one of the most important and influential filmmakers of his era, and not only because he was a founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He gave John Wayne his first leading role in The Big Trail, also helming James Cagney’s White Heat and Humphrey Bogart’s High Sierra.
It wasn’t the baking heat of the locations that irked Douglas, but the way Walsh treated his crew as expendable. “Walsh was a brutal man with a patch over one eye,” he added. “He had lost the eye one night in Utah in a car driven off-road by a drunk Mormon.” That’s nothing if not an interesting way to become cycloptic, but the actor was aghast at how much the director adored onscreen brutality.
“Walsh loved violence,” he explained. “I was disgusted one day to see him get excited, almost to the point of orgasm, while watching a dangerous stunt in which a stuntman almost got killed. I could see his sexual glee, watching the stuntman almost get kicked in the head as he ran through a stable of kicking horses.”
Again, it was quite the allegation to suggest that Walsh was in need of a tissue when almost watching one of his crew meet their end, but Douglas always called it as he saw it. As you might expect, that was the only time they worked together as actor and director.
