Immigrant Son, Acting Legend, Standard Bearer For Liberalism: Kirk Douglas

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'How Izzy Demsky became Kirk Douglas: the ultimate Hollywood makeover.' Kirk Douglas. The scrawny son of Jewish immigrants transformed himself into an icon of US manhood – a narrative the nation is forgetting in the Trump era. Yet a darker side lurked too. The Guardian, Feb. 7, 2020.

Handsome, muscular, noble – not words that would automatically have been associated with a Yiddish-speaking schmutter-seller’s son whose family were not long off the boat from what is now Belarus. But we know better: in these nativist times, it is worth remembering that Izzy Demsky was the beneficiary of the ultimate Hollywood makeover: the scrawny, hustling scion of immigrants who evolved into Kirk Douglas, the acme of all-American manhood, and evolved once again into a sensitive, politically conscious standard-bearer for liberalism.

Douglas, who has died aged 103, became an unrecognisable figure from that of his childhood. His story follows a near-mythic immigrant arc that the US has chosen to ignore in the Trump era. In this he was aided by physiognomy: like Bernie Schwartz (AKA Tony Curtis), his smooth good looks opened doors closed to the likes of Manny Goldenberg (AKA Edward G Robinson). Douglas became an authentic star in 1949 with the brawling boxing picture Champion, only two years after Hollywood nervously tackled the subject of antisemitism in Gentleman’s Agreement and Crossfire, and fully two decades before ethnic minority-looking actors such as Dustin Hoffman were able to play romantic leads.



But Douglas was always an actor of intelligence as well as charm: he quickly latched on to roles that demanded ambiguity and venality alongside raffishness, with the likes of Ace in the Hole and The Bad and the Beautiful. In the former, he allied himself with Billy Wilder, Hollywood’s master of comic bad taste, to carve a portrait of a vicious, unprincipled reporter trying to get back in the big time; in the latter he played a by-any-means-necessary backstabber of a film producer in a film that exposed the industry’s complex morality to an unprecedented degree. Both films widened Douglas’s acting palette, and opened up the range of what a commercially powerful male lead could do on screen.

Douglas also had the sense to know which way the wind was blowing and was one of the first big-name actors to follow Burt Lancaster’s lead to start producing his own films: some of his best-known titles, including Paths of Glory, Lust for Life and Spartacus were made under his own banner. His production company, which he named Bryna after his mother, was about more than escaping the industry grind, or Hollywood’s intellectual paralysis as the studio system began to break down: he could use his status to get politically charged material through the Hollywood system in a way that seems conventional now, but in the McCarthy era was a career-risking struggle.

The gladiator picture Spartacus, most obviously, contributed to the breaking of the Hollywood blacklist in 1960 by naming Dalton Trumbo in its credits – until then persona non grata after falling victim to the anti-communist witch-hunts over a decade earlier...

More, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/feb/06/kirk-douglas-ultimate-hollywood-makeover

- Kirk Douglas, H.wood Blacklist; 'Exodus,' 'Spartacus.' NBC, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kirk-douglas-helped-end-hollywood-blacklist-he-wasn-t-alone-n1131256

- A Tribute, 'Films and Interviews of Kirk Douglas,' RIP *Exclusive (2020).