The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (120 page)

Douglas’s career began properly after the war, although he had worked on the stage before war service in the navy. In 1946, Hal Wallis signed him and Douglas made his debut in Milestone’s
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
(46). He made his way in
I Walk Alone
(47, Byron Haskin), John Stahl’s
The Walls of Jericho
(48), and Mankiewicz’s
A Letter to Three Wives
(49) before reaching stardom as the boxer in
Champion
. After that, he has never lost his popularity, nor the ability to enjoy himself. He is endearing in that he has so seldom been involved in solemnity or pretension. These vices seem to have been worked out of the system early with
Mourning Becomes Electra
(47, Dudley Nichols) and
The Glass Menagerie
(50, Irving Rapper) and have only reappeared in Anatole Litvak’s
Act of Love
(53), Reinhardt’s awful
Town Without Pity
(61), in
Seven Days in May
(64, John Frankenheimer) and, sadly, in Kazan’s
The Arrangement
(69).

Douglas more usually goes to the extreme of playfulness—as in the very enjoyable
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
(54, Fleischer) and de Toth’s
The Indian Fighter
(55). In addition, he has made a few out-of-the-way movies well worth recording: Richard Quine’s excellent
Strangers When We Meet
(60)—in which Kim Novak explores the cleft in his chin, as if wondering in which film he got that wound; David Miller’s
Lonely Are the Brave
(62); and recovering from breakdown and the shakes in Minnelli’s
Two Weeks in Another Town
(62), a fond companion piece to
The Bad and the Beautiful
.

By the late sixties Douglas had slipped into lazy action films and weak comedies and such guest spots as Patton in
Is Paris Burning?
(66, René Clément). He often made films through his own production company, Bryna, and in 1968 he produced Martin Ritt’s
The Brotherhood
in which he played an old-fashioned Mafioso upset by a new generation of grey-suit executives. He was in
A Gunfight
(71, Lamont Johnson); tortured by Yul Brynner in
The Light at the Edge of the World
(71, Kevin Billington); cast against type as a mousey biology teacher in
Cat and Mouse
(74, Daniel Petrie).

In 1973, he directed his first film,
Scalawag
, sadly without the Shields touch. But
Posse
, in 1975, was an accomplished Western in which Kirk had Bruce Dern as worthy opposition. He seems less interested in acting alone to judge by Jacqueline Susann’s
Once Is Not Enough
(74, Guy Green)—in which he claims that his balls have been cut off;
Victory at Entebbe
(76, Marvin J. Chomsky); and
Holocaust 2000
(77, Alberto de Martino). But he was his old urgent self, as a father searching for a lost son, in
The Fury
(78, Brian De Palma), horribly betrayed by the film.

Douglas has probably given more care in the eighties to writing his autobiography and a novel—to say nothing of eyeing his son Michael’s new power competitively. But he has acted a good deal, keeping his most intense work for television:
The Villain
(79, Hal Needham);
Home Movies
(79, De Palma);
Saturn 3
(80, Stanley Donen);
The Final Countdown
(80, Don Taylor);
The Man from Snowy River
(82, George Miller);
Remembrance of Love
(82, Jack Smight) for TV;
Eddie Macon’s Run
(83, Jeff Kanew);
Draw!
(84, Steven Hilliard Stern); as a man in a nursing home in
Amos
(85, Michael Tuchner), which resembled
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest;
with Burt Lancaster in
Tough Guys
(86, Kanew);
Queenie
(87, Larry Peerce) for TV, playing the Alexander Korda figure; as William Jennings Bryan in TV’s
Inherit the Wind
(88, David Greene);
Oscar
(91, John Landis); and
Greedy
(94, Jonathan Lynn).

He survived a serious stroke, strove in his special way for rehabilitation, and returned in the obvious, but rousing,
Diamonds
(99, John Asher). He is a Jonathan Shields still—someone we can’t hang up on. Though
It Runs in the Family
(03, Fred Schepisi) was strictly on hold,
The Illusion
(04, Michael A. Goorjian) awaits release.

Melvyn Douglas
(Melvyn Edouard Hesselberg) (1901–81), b. Macon, Georgia
In his films, Douglas was an escort, husband, lover, or good friend to every love queen of the 1930s and 1940s. A sampling of titles shows how invariably attention was on the lady
—There’s Always a Woman
(38, Alexander Hall);
I’ll Take Romance
(37, Edward H. Griffith);
Women of Romance
(37);
There’s That Woman Again
(39);
Good Girls Go to Paris
(39, Hall);
Too Many Husbands
(40, Wesley Ruggles);
He Stayed for Breakfast
(40, Hall); and
They All Kissed the Bride
(42, Hall).

The son of a concert pianist, Douglas was a stage actor. In 1931, he was in a play,
Tonight Or Never;
Gloria Swanson asked for him to play opposite her in the movie, produced by Goldwyn and directed by Mervyn Le Roy. An auspicious debut, followed by the male lead to Garbo in
As You Desire Me
(32, George Fitzmaurice). But Douglas was too pale a copy of William Powell to prosper. He was released from his contract to Goldwyn and dwindled for several years until Columbia put him opposite Claudette Colbert in
She Married Her Boss
(35, Gregory La Cava). Comedy suited him better and he cemented a new status with Irene Dunne in
Theodora Goes Wild
(36, Richard Boleslavsky). He now moved to MGM, initially to support Joan Crawford in
The Gorgeous Hussy
(36, Clarence Brown). Over the next few years, he remained dependent on the lady star of his films, but he managed several notable pairings: with Dietrich in
Angel
(37, Ernst Lubitsch); Crawford again in
The Shining Hour
(38, Frank Borzage); with Garbo in
Ninotchka
(39, Lubitsch); Loretta Young in
He Stayed for Breakfast
(40); with Merle Oberon in
That Uncertain Feeling
(41, Lubitsch); as the surgeon restoring Joan Crawford’s beauty in
A Woman’s Face
(41, George Cukor); squire to Garbo in her last film,
Two-Faced Woman
(42, Cukor).

Douglas had a distinguished war record and returned to less romantic parts. Although not especially successful, greater demands seemed to encourage him:
Sea of Grass
(47, Elia Kazan);
The Guilt of Janet Ames
(47, Henry Levin);
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
(48, H. C. Potter);
A Woman’s Secret
(48, Nicholas Ray);
The Great Sinner
(49, Robert Siodmak); and
My Forbidden Past
(51, Robert Stevenson).

He spent the next ten years on the stage and in TV and returned to films as a character actor, apparently much more seasoned than his former self: as the Dansker in
Billy Budd
(62, Peter Ustinov); a supporting actor Oscar in
Hud
(62, Martin Ritt);
Advance to the Rear
(63, George Marshall);
The Americanization of Emily
(64, Arthur Hiller);
Rapture
(65, John Guillermin);
Hotel
(67, Richard Quine);
I Never Sang For My Father
(70, Gilbert Cates);
The Candidate
(72, Michael Ritchie);
The Tenant
(76, Roman Polanski);
Twilight’s Last Gleaming
(77, Robert Aldrich);
The Seduction of Joe Tynan
(79, Jerry Schatzberg);
The Changeling
(79, Peter Medak);
Being There
(79, Hal Ashby), for which he won another best supporting actor Oscar;
Ghost Story
(81, John Irvin); and
Tell Me a Riddle
(81, Lee Grant).

Michael Douglas
, b. New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1944
By June 1992, after thirteen weeks in release,
Basic Instinct
(Paul Verhoeven) reported $105.7 million in U.S. domestic film rentals. Anything near $100 million feels comfortable. But
Instinct
had been a very early bloomer. There was so much advance word (on the expensive script; on the writer’s second thoughts; on gay/lesbian protest; on the X or R rating; on Sharon Stone’s insolent looks), and such a canny TV promo, that there were lines around the block that first week. The sensation passed.
Instinct
did not really reach as far down into the hopeful dreams of middle America as
Fatal Attraction
(87, Adrian Lyne). From week seven onward,
Basic Instinct
was doing modest business. Even at $105 million, profit was some nominal way away: and profit in Hollywood is subject to Heisenbergian uncertainty—one may determine mass or momentum but seldom the two together, and never the day when it will come. Profit had to be set beside such things as Michael Douglas’s $14 million salary.

I doubt Sharon Stone earned a tenth of Douglas’s pay. Yet she was the talking point of the movie and the leg-crossing come-on in the promos. She could have been bitter; she should have felt blessed that, after an untidy, hardly managed career, she had gotten that part. Douglas’s name was above the title, but hers was the face that gazed out balefully over his shoulder in the poster image. Her nails were sinking into the flesh of his shoulder. So the instinct in the title seemed to promise her aggression and his masochism. Just another movie about women having the power …

That is not to disparage Douglas. In Hollywood, one is worth whatever the system will give out, and that is only prompted by clout. Clout comprises past record and present demeanor. Michael Douglas has sold movies, and he has possessed a rare ability to be strong and weak at the same time. There is in his eyes, his jaw, his hairline, and his voice the memory of his father. But there is also something like his horror at being so like Kirk. What fuel for an actor! It has allowed Michael Douglas to play a man who is weak, culpable, morally indolent, compromised, and greedy for illicit sensation without losing that basic probity or potential for ethical character that we require of a hero.

Thus, in
Fatal Attraction
, the trap of the movie worked because Douglas could commit adultery and enjoy it on our behalf (it has wild, comic, clumsy couplings that owe a lot to Douglas’s grasp of comedy in passion) and still be a properly threatened family man. One may argue that this was humbug and hypocrisy, but it worked. That’s why and how the family survived at the end of the film, while truer, dramatic resolutions were discarded. Like any hit movie,
Fatal Attraction
had to be an advertisement for American dreaming—share the fantasy.

When
Basic Instinct
came along, it drew upon the spineless spine in Douglas and used the selling line: “A brutal murder. A brilliant killer. A cop who can’t resist the danger.” There would be very few American movies if we did not feel drawn toward the vicarious experience of wondering whether
we
could resist the danger. Douglas is perfect meat for the experiment, prime USDA but just a little aged, on the marbled brink of decay.

All of which leads us back to Kirk Douglas, the model and mentor over whom Michael is most confused. Few grant that Kirk Douglas onscreen was both stronger and weaker than Michael has a taste for (this is more melodrama than modesty). Still, the senior Douglas was a pioneer of good intention yielding to temptation, and of resolve coming apart. He resonated with his own fall in
Champion, Ace in the Hole, Detective Story, The Bad and the Beautiful
, and
Lust for Life
—in most of the most Kirkian films, the ones where he is fit to be a Karamazov.

We must remember that Michael Douglas is the son of the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant—and of a Wasp mother. The parents were divorced when Michael was only a kid, and there was a stepfather, gentler and more able to talk to the boy. But in Michael Douglas’s extraordinary success—in Hollywood, in America—in his seeming smoothness, we may begin to understand Kirk’s sense of failure and roughness. For it isn’t only sons who have a cross to bear.

Michael Douglas was raised in the East and sent to prep schools. But he rejected Yale for the University of California at Santa Barbara, not as good or tough a school, but a pretty place. Douglas still has a house in Santa Barbara, the place he prefers, and an important friend he found there, Danny DeVito.

By the late sixties, he had decided to be an actor, and he was the second lead to Karl Malden in the TV series
Streets of San Francisco
(1972–77). That overlapped with movies:
Hail, Hero!
(69, David Miller);
Adam at 6 A.M
. (70, Robert Scheerer);
Summertree
(71, Anthony Newley); and for Disney,
Napoleon and Samantha
(72, Bernard McEveety).

There was little hint then of a lasting actor. But at that point, Michael persuaded Kirk to give up hopes of playing in a movie of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, for which the father had the rights. Instead, Michael would try to get the picture made. It worked: with Saul Zaentz, Milos Forman, and Jack Nicholson, the son produced the picture and brought it in to great acclaim and boxoffice success. He collected the Oscar for best picture. Kirk made a lot of money, and was surely proud. He was also mortified. Which is not to say Michael’s feelings were unalloyed. For Douglases, triumph may need to be ambivalent.

Michael was established as a producer, and it may still be the case that that job moves him more than acting. His next few films as an actor were not much more than keep-fit workouts in which he let the actresses take the center of energy:
Coma
(78, Michael Crichton) and
It’s My Turn
(80, Claudia Weill). He was certainly energetic in
Running
(79, Steven Howard Stern), but without the intensity of, say, Bruce Dern. Nor was he better than a bystander in
The China Syndrome
(79, James Bridges), but again he had produced that film, which opened shortly before Three Mile Island. There is no rule against luck for a producer, and no need to ponder whether the luck is good or bad.