Hollywood vs the world: the movie Kirk Douglas called “better than some foreign horseshit”
Even though he was born Issur Danielovitch to Belarussian immigrant parents in the Amsterdam area of New York named after the capital city of the Netherlands, Kirk Douglas seemed to hold absolutely no interest in cinema that existed outside of Hollywood’s borders.
He was a major star who gained fame during a ‘Golden Age’ overflowing with icons, but once he had enough clout, he became his own biggest backer. One of the first names to form their own production company, Douglas dedicated himself to passion projects in between the well-paying studio gigs that maintained a steady income stream, but he was never known as being particularly experimental.
The projects he assembled from the ground up were largely dramas that allowed him to play characters the major studios either wouldn’t cast him as or had no interest in making, so while it was commendable that he took charge of his destiny and played an instrumental role in ending the anti-communist blacklist, it’s not as if he was out there dabbling in existentialism.
During the peak of his career in the 1960s, international cinema was overflowing with auteurs who developed a regular habit of propelling the medium forward. Hailing from all over the world, the decade was regularly flush with new works from Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, and Andrei Tarkovsky, to name just a few, but Douglas only had eyes on America.
Once Dalton Trumbo was welcomed back into the fold as the credited writer of Spartacus, he quickly became one of Douglas’s most trusted creative partners. He performed uncredited rewrites on Town Without Pity—ironically an international co-production—penned the script for The Last Sunset and wrote Lonely Are the Brave.
A modern western rooted in the socio-political ideologies and conflicts of the time, the 1962 film stars Douglas as a Korean War veteran and ranchhand who struggles to find his place in an ever-evolving modern world. After being arrested following a barroom brawl, the protagonist escapes from incarceration and heads for the New Mexico hills, becoming the subject of a statewide manhunt.
Douglas was a huge fan of the movie, even if he refused to be drawn on its meaning. “There was a movie that communicated on all levels,” he told Roger Ebert. “Maybe it was anti-establishment, or maybe it was about a kooky cowboy.” The true answer lay somewhere in the middle, but he was at least unequivocal regarding its superiority over anything hailing from outside America.
“A movie like that is so much better than some foreign horseshit about an actor chewing for 20 minutes,” Douglas suggested, frustratingly failing to mention if he’d actually gained first-hand experience of watching a movie where a character does nothing but chow down for an extended period of time. It was the unrestricted film world of the ’60s, though, so it can’t be ruled out by any stretch.
Rugged hero on horseback fighting against small-town societal oppression? Good. Extended takes of people doing nothing, probably shot in black and white and designed to invoke the mundanities of the human condition that were produced outside the good ol’ US of A? Bad, according to Douglas at least.
