Kirk Douglas and his career highlights: “I loved working with Billy, who became a good friend”
Hollywood icon Kirk Douglas not only became one of the most famous actors in American cinema history, but he also achieved the remarkable milestone of living beyond the age of 100. Despite his longevity, Douglas is best known for his striking performances in a series of acclaimed movies spanning the 20th century and into the 21st.
Across more than 90 films, Douglas delivered an intense and almost incendiary acting style, and he was recognised at the Academy Awards on a number of occasions. Douglas’ first Oscar nomination arrived after his effort in 1949’s Champion. Three years later, he earned his second for The Bad and the Beautiful, and shortly after, a third arrived for his effort as Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life.
Throughout his career, Douglas worked with some of the most notable names in the film industry, including then-unknown Stanley Kubrick on Paths of Glory and Spartacus, as well as Burt Lancaster on seven brilliant occasions. However, there was one film figure that Douglas seemed to enjoy working with the most, Billy Wilder, with whom he collaborated on 1951’s drama film Ace in the Hole.
The film saw Douglas play a disgruntled and disgraced news journalist who does everything in his power to get another job at a major outlet after being fired from eleven big newspapers as a result of his ill-temper and aggressive behaviour. Ace in the Hole explores the manipulative nature of the press and how deeply it can influence an unsuspecting public.
Speaking with HuffPost, Douglas once noted his impressions of Ace in the Hole. “To no one’s surprise, I again played the self-serving bad guy in Billy Wilder’s drama about a disgraced journalist trying to reinvent his big career in small-town Albuquerque,” the actor said. “When a tunnel collapses outside a small town, he sees a big opportunity in his exclusive coverage of the man trapped below, convincing him to delay rescue for the sake of the headlines.”
According to Douglas, one scene in Ace in the Hole had his character need to choke his co-star Jan Sterling, but the scene ended in calamity with Douglas explaining, “Before the cameras rolled, I told Jan to let me know if I was being too rough. When she turned blue and went limp, I released her. ‘Why didn’t you stop me?!’ I demanded when she came to. ‘I couldn’t,’ she rasped, ‘because you were choking me.'”
Ace in the Hole marked the first time that Wilder had served as a writer, producer and director on a movie and it was also the first film he made after breaking with his frequent collaborator Charles Brackett. The film was not well received at first, becoming both a critical and commercial failure, although Douglas pointed out the fact that it eventually become a “cult favourite” and that he “loved working with Billy, who became a good friend.”
Indeed, while Ace in the Hole was not successful upon release, it later became reappraised and drew the attention of Spike Lee, who considers it one of his favourite movies of all time. According to Lee, Wilder’s film contains “one of the greatest final shots in the history of cinema,” and it was that kind of attention to detail when it came to the film’s production that made Kirk Douglas enjoy working with Billy Wilder so much.
