 |
|
|
Kirk Douglas, Detective Story by Michael Atkinson "I oughta fall on you like the sword of God," snarls Kirk Douglas's Jim McLeod to some felonious bottom-feeder in the back of a police van in 1951's Detective Story, and you not only believe his every word, you pray to the same God he never catches you so much as jaywalking. McLeod is the quintessential Douglas persona, a tightly wound maniac cop with a righteous streak as wide as 42nd Street. No other actor could have played him. Douglas remains one of Hollywood's least respected, least liked stars, and it's easy to see why: he chafes, he spits bile, he's a human dynamo perpetually on the verge of a meltdown. Watching Douglas act in his prime can be harrowing--he's so in-your-face you can taste his sweat. It's something of a miracle he was a star. In the years of Douglas's heyday, the late '40s and '50s, most moviegoers preferred the milder-mannered masculinities of Lancaster, Wayne or Hudson. Douglas was for the meateaters in the crowd. He said nuts to compromise in film after film and laid bare so much painful hostility it made Method actors seem positively dainty. In Detective Story--an otherwise stagy version of a bristly, hard-bitten play--Douglas is a memorably bellicose, hair-trigger prick facing the worst day of his life. Already haunted by a personal history in which his psychotic father drove his mother into a madhouse, McLeod discovers that his snow-pure wife (Eleanor Parker) had a back-alley abortion years before at the hands of the same slimy miscreant (George Macready) he has been trying to convict and send up the river for good. That's why she can't get pregnant, he learns while trying to settle other cases (one of which requires a drop of mercy he constitutionally can't give) and stave off the abortionist's prodding lawyer. PAGE 1 | 2 |
 |
|
|
McLeod's low boil accelerates into a raging lava flow when he's cornered with his wife in a small office and finds himself helplessly torn between his love for her and his soul-deep loathing of what she's become in his eyes. Douglas uses his whole body in this brutal scene--it threatens to curl up into a giant fist and start pounding the walls. But watch his face, too; it's a huge lost baby's puss electrocuted with primal horror. It reminds you of Douglas's scenes of suffering in Spartacus and Champion, but here it's all coiled inside, ready to split him open. Douglas knows just when to pressure-crack his voice ("I'm warning ya!"), though nothing he does ever seems calculated. He is American cinema's last angry man, more at home with desperation, angst and violence than any other actor. "Touch me again and I'll tear your arm out of the socket," McLeod growls from between clenched teeth to the lowlife who knocked up his wife, and Douglas delivers the line with such white-hot intensity you're surprised the room doesn't burst into flames. Every moment Douglas is on the screen feels like a crime of passion. What did you think of this performance? Sound off in the Movie Forum. PAGE 1 | 2 |