Kirk Douglas names his only perfect movie: “One draft, no revisions”
While most actors strive for perfection in the movies they work on, not many would admit that they or the films they have appeared in have actually achieved this. For many, perfection doesn’t really exist, it’s just an illusion to keep them striving. However, legendary actor and producer Kirk Douglas wasn’t one to shy away from perfection. Born in the middle of World War I and living until just before the Covid-19 pandemic, Douglas had enough time to strive for perfection and with a long, illustrious career, he seemed to be pretty close.
When HuffPost tasked him with picking the films he was most proud of, there was one on the list that Douglas claimed to be the perfect movie. Considering the actor starred and produced around 90 films, it’s no mean feat to pick his favourites and crown one perfection. And, out of all of them, the leading man chose Lonely Are The Brave – 1962 black-and-white western about a “modern-day cowboy still living by the code of the Old West.”
Douglas loved “the theme that if you try to be an individual, society will crush you” and praised the screenwriter, “Dalton wrote the perfect screenplay – one draft, no revisions”. The Dalton he refers to was the award-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who wrote films such as Exodus, Spartacus and Roman Holiday. His perfect screenplay follows Douglas as Jack Burns as he attempts to navigate the modern world as an Old West cowboy and decides to break his friend out of jail. To get arrested, he picks a fight with a one-armed man in a bar, and it turns out that said actor was iconic actor Burt Lancaster’s professional stand-in.
But, while all of these things seemed to make Lonely Are the Brave the perfect film in Douglas’ eyes, the process was by no means the same. The picture Douglas painted of production was pretty grim. For one, the shooting conditions were less than ideal, “It was a tough shoot in and around Albuquerque — high altitude, snow, fog and freezing rain in May!” As the trailer says, the film was “actually photographed atop the 10000 ft high Sandia Mountains of New Mexico”.
And while Douglas celebrated the screenwriter, he was on less amicable terms with the director of the picture. “I didn’t get along with the director very well; plus, he had no regard for safety,” he explained on HuffPost, before detailing an incident where the director, David Miller, put the horse’s safety over the actors while shooting in the mountains.
Already over 15 years into his screen career, Douglas had seen his fair share of accidents, so knew it wasn’t worth risking his life for the whim of a director, “Even after I explained, he argued with me, but I had seen too many unnecessary accidents to agree.” While Douglas didn’t feel like sacrificing his life for the horses, he was fond of the animal, claiming the “best relationship I had on this film was with my horse, Whisky. Of course, the horse couldn’t talk back.”
Yet, despite all the complications, the screenplay, the story and the horse ensured that the film was perfect in Douglas’ eyes. Out of 90 films, he surely had on-set and day-to-day working experiences that were far more enjoyable, presumably the films he worked with his family on. But still, Lonely Are The Brave remained his one perfect favourite film.
