DOUGLAS, Kirk

(1916– )

   Born Issur Danielovitch Demsky in New York, the cleft-chinned, intensely masculine actor has been a significant force in Hollywood film since he began his career in 1946. The Westerns of Kirk Douglas span the classic Western era and demonstrate the progression through the period. Along the Great Divide (1951), a Raoul Walsh film, looks back to the great epics of the 1940s with their emphasis on panoramic landscapes and the insignificance of humanity in the natural world. Man without a Star (1955), in which Douglas played opposite Claire Trevor, typifies 1950s introspective Westerns. Douglas played a cowboy torn between the needs of settlers and their barbed wire and the needs of the ranchers and open range. His Westerns of the 1960s, such as The Way West (1967) and The War Wagon (1967), which costarred John Wayne, show the 1960s’emphasis on action and maintaining traditional cultural values. Douglas’s Posse (1975), which he also directed, shows the ambiguity toward authority that 1970s Westerns were developing. The marshal brings in the notorious outlaw only to find the town turning against him.

   But Kirk Douglas’s most famous Western character is probably Doc Holliday in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957). Opposite Burt Lancaster’s Wyatt Earp, Douglas portrayed a man who has little to live for, only finding purpose through loyalty to Earp. His treatment of Kate (Jo Van Fleet) is far more brutal than Victor Mature’s Doc Holliday in My Darling Clementine (1946).