Kirk Douglas, RIP

[Blumf]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-51394855

Actor Kirk Douglas, a fixture of cinema for six decades, has died aged 103.

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000018/

And have to link this:
https://youtu.be/izy2ittIe7A

[Sin Agog]

Dunno why, probably because it was one of those random stumble-upons you give way too much mental real estate because you're a teen and you ain't seen shit yet, but his debut The Strange Love of Martha Ivers used to be one of my favourite ever films when I was a wean.  Haven't seen it in awhile, but who debuted with an actually good movie in the mulish work-your-way-up Hollywood system back then?  Kirk Douglas did.

Only saw Brian De Palma's The Fury for the first time last year, but I loved that disjointed camel of a movie.  He plays a sexy old leatherdaddy who's screwed over by John Cassavetes right at the beginning of the movie.  It starts off kind of a comedy spy thing, only to morph into a lurid proto-Scanners.  Awesome fillum.

I vaguely remember seeing a film of his that must have come out before The Godfather in which he basically plays Michael Corleone.  A war vet son of a don drawn into the mafia world by his fam.  Bet it's comparatively a piece of shit, and how can he not be miscast in that role, but the parallels were pretty eerie.

[Keebleman]

Olivia de Havilland triumphant!

[Bronzy]

RIP shagger

[Sin Agog]

Oy lay!

[bgmnts]

Thats a bold bit of sex talk that! Love it.

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

103 is no age.

Someone had to make that crap joke.

Kirk was my first notion of what a Film Star and Proper Actor is. Grew up watching his films on TV and I was always mesmerised by his intensity and charisma. He wasn't one of those vanilla leading man actors, he always looked he'd tear your face off, laugh about it afterwards and then writhe around screaming on the floor.

Watch him in Billy Wilder's Ace In The Hole, an acidic critique of tabloid media exploitation. It hasn't dated a jot, it's an evergreen globule of bile.

He was also one of those lefty liberal pinko types, he stood up to the McCarthy witch-hunt and hired loads of tarnished writers and directors. A good man (probably).

[hedgehog90]

Never seen an old film of his where he isn't generally fantastic fun to watch.
Ace in the Hole might be my favourite performance of his, where he plays a massive cunt journalist.

I hope Oscer gives him a classy send-off.
RIP

[Phoenix Lazarus]

Only saw Brian De Palma's The Fury for the first time last year, but I loved that disjointed camel of a movie.  He plays a sexy old leatherdaddy who's screwed over by John Cassavetes right at the beginning of the movie.  It starts off kind of a comedy spy thing, only to morph into a lurid proto-Scanners.  Awesome fillum.

Seconded.  The last fifteen minutes are awesome.  Best comeuppances I've ever seen for a bad guy and bad gal.

[sevendaughters]

He is top rate as a slimeball in Out of the Past.

[Monsieur Verdoux]

Obviously he was at his best playing hard-nosed (and hard-chinned) sons-of-bitches in Noir and war films, but he was also excellent in one of my favourite glossy unrequited love films, Richard Quine's Strangers When We Meet

[chveik]

he was good as Ollie in The Thick of It.

[Jerzy Bondov]

Not a good time to bring it up but I always think about a very disrespectful joke made by Vic Reeves on Shooting Stars:
"True or false, Kirk Douglas has three arseholes... It's true. One in the usual place. One *points at chin* here. And his son, Michael"

RIP

[Phoenix Lazarus]

I wonder how Jean Spangler's family are feeling.

[Keebleman]

Natalie Wood's sister has finally confirmed those rumours.

https://variety.com/2021/film/news/kirk-douglas-rape-natalie-wood-lana-sister-book-1235105228/

It has been so long since Douglas's death I was beginning to wonder if the - alleged - culprit was the still-alive Robert Wagner.

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

One thing about Robert Wagner and Lana Wood is that Wagner eventually married Jill St. John. Both women had affairs with Sean Connery during production of Diamonds Are Forever. When they found out, they became mortal enemies, and it was one aggravating factor for her against Wagner.

About Kirk Douglas, it's more than likely true, and it actually looks like Natalie and Lana's mother would push an underage Natalie towards big stars and directors if it helped her getting parts. Still doesn't excuse what these guys did.
And keep in mind that Lana's version of the story reads nothing like the one that surfaced a decade ago and was extremely popular. It was extremely graphic, and came from a guy on a gossip blog who had reportedly heard about it from the family. The guy was a fraud, who posed, among others, at being friends with Robert Downey Jr (when he didn't pose at being RDJ himself) or being the illegitimate son of the late Time Warner CEO Steve Ross. He would catfish women. In reality, he was a failed screenwriter and musician, who didn't spend more than a few months in Hollywood. The guy also had an obsession with Natalie Wood, claiming at some point that he had met her once, as a kid, and that she had insisted on being buried with a piece of jewelry he had made especially for her, or that he was friends with her daughters. He most likely heard the story like a lot of people did, through the grapevine, and added the graphic details on his own. And the gossip blog he contributed to (he died a couple of years ago) quickly turned into an alt-right place for showbiz-related QAnon conspiracies.

[Twit 2]

Cark Deadlas

[Keebleman]

One thing about Robert Wagner and Lana Wood is that Wagner eventually married Jill St. John. Both women had affairs with Sean Connery during production of Diamonds Are Forever. When they found out, they became mortal enemies, and it was one aggravating factor for her against Wagner.

About Kirk Douglas, it's more than likely true, and it actually looks like Natalie and Lana's mother would push an underage Natalie towards big stars and directors if it helped her getting parts. Still doesn't excuse what these guys did.
And keep in mind that Lana's version of the story reads nothing like the one that surfaced a decade ago and was extremely popular. It was extremely graphic, and came from a guy on a gossip blog who had reportedly heard about it from the family. The guy was a fraud, who posed, among others, at being friends with Robert Downey Jr (when he didn't pose at being RDJ himself) or being the illegitimate son of the late Time Warner CEO Steve Ross. He would catfish women. In reality, he was a failed screenwriter and musician, who didn't spend more than a few months in Hollywood. The guy also had an obsession with Natalie Wood, claiming at some point that he had met her once, as a kid, and that she had insisted on being buried with a piece of jewelry he had made especially for her, or that he was friends with her daughters. He most likely heard the story like a lot of people did, through the grapevine, and added the graphic details on his own. And the gossip blog he contributed to (he died a couple of years ago) quickly turned into an alt-right place for showbiz-related QAnon conspiracies.

Yeah, that version seemed much worse than the one that's just emerged, the sort of attack that would get a life sentence.  Not that the incident in Lana Wood's account is exactly a misdemeanor. 

Here's a pic of Kirk with Wagner and Wood from, I'm guessing, the early 60s (Wood and Wagner's first marriage was 1957 till 1962).  They both look pretty relaxed with him and nothing about it seems forced or unnatural, though no doubt all concerned were aware of the presence of photographers.

[George White]

Reminded of Lana Wood's turn in Greyeagle, a semi-exploitation ripoff of The Searchers, where she plays a young woman taken by an "Indian brave" (Alex Cord, Archangel off Airwolf in gravy browning and pigtail wig) to a chief, and her cowboy dad goes off to find her, only to be revealed the chief is her real dad.

The chief is played by Italian-American Arthur English-alike and Native American fraudster Iron Eyes Cody.
The white cowboy dad is played by actual part-Cherokee Ben Johnson, who was literally born on a Cherokee reservation.