The Kirk Douglas movie Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “It is unbearable junk”
For the most part, Roger Ebert was a fan of Kirk Douglas. At the very least, he appreciated and respected his contributions to cinema, which saw him become a powerhouse both onscreen and off.
Not content with being one of ‘Golden Age’ Hollywood’s biggest stars, Douglas impacted the industry away from the cameras in arguably more important ways than anything he did in front of them. He was among the first to found his own production company to develop passion projects, which were typically funded by a ‘one for them, one for me’ policy that saw him work for the major studios to get the money required to tell the stories he was most interested in telling.
He was also instrumental in helping to end the communist witchhunt that had plagued the business throughout the 1950s when he fought to have Dalton Trumbo credited under his real name for writing the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, which he called the greatest achievement of his career.
Douglas continued working until he was in his 90s, and he lived for more than a decade after his final screen credit in the 2008 made-for-TV movie Empire State Building Murders before passing at the age of 103. Inevitably, his output slowed down due to a combination of age and health issues, which left Ebert in a difficult position when director John Mallory Asher’s dramedy Diamonds was released in 1999.
Describing the film as “a very bad movie and a genuinely moving experience,” Ebert acknowledged that he was torn between the two sides of the production. On one hand, he appreciated that “as a demonstration of Kirk Douglas‘ heart and determination, it is inspiring,” with the actor returning to the big screen for the first time since he’d suffered a debilitating stroke in 1996.
On the other hand, that wasn’t enough to give Diamonds a pass: “It is unbearable junk,” he wrote in his one-star review, with Ebert caught between a rock and a hard place. He appreciated the star’s grit, determination, and commitment for taking on a leading role less than three years after his stroke, even if it came in a picture where he’s forced to deal with a “dreary story and unconvincing characters he has been surrounded with.”
In reality, it’s more of a tribute to Douglas than a film to be judged on its own merits. He plays a former boxing champion recovering from a severe stroke that’s impacted his ability to speak, and Diamonds brings even more of the actor’s baggage into the equation by using footage from his Academy Award-nominated performance as a pugilist in 1949’s Champion to inform the character.
“It is painful to watch actors speaking dialogue that is clearly inferior to the thoughts that must be running through their minds at the very same time,” Ebert said, before reiterating that Douglas’ performance – regardless of how terrible a movie it came in – was “the only way” to get even a shred of enjoyment or entertainment from Diamonds.
