“Shavelson and Kirk Douglas fought so incessantly during the making of “Cast a Giant Shadow” that Shavelson at one point walked off the set, letting his assistant shoot the film for a day. After the film was released, Douglas sent Shavelson a letter, which still hangs on the wall of his office. “Mel, I think it was a good picture,” it reads. “It could have been better if I had paid more attention to you.”

Shavelson says he shares blame for their clashes. “It was very tough to argue with Kirk because he was very intelligent and very often he was right. He had to be the boss and I had to be the director, and there’s no in-between ground.’”

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-goldstein1may01,0,7534724.story?page=1

George Orwell has written a great deal on this phenomenon, which unfolded before his eyes to his obvious dismay. (Though, to my knowledge, he hasn’t written about Trumbo specifically.)

I’d like more substantation of this charge:

“Trumbo was … and blatently insincere in using his gifts as propaganda for Moscow.”

You oughta have a preview/edit feature on this site, like on the Tom W blog, to protect people like me from themselves.

1. Kirk Douglas had a fine acting career: not the most versatile of actors, but forecful and distinctive.

2. He was right to insist on Trumbo getting the screen credit he deserved. Trumbo was a gifted writer, and there is no reason that anyone should be excluded from the entertainment industry based on their politics.

3. Trumbo was a communist, and blatently insincere in using his gifts as propaganda for Moscow. He wrote the famous anti-war book “Johnny Got his Gun”, during the brief interval of the Russo-German pact, when the party line was anti-war. One Hitler invaded Russia, he was just as strenuously pro-war.

4. There was a disproportion of people like that in Hollywood at the time. The blacklist was wrong, I believe, but there was nothing wrong, in my view, in letting people know the agendas of those who are telling them their stories.

He is such an intense actor that at times he is almost feral, and he occasionally would overdo it. (He was also famous for driving directors and costars batty.) But I look at the movies we’re all listing here, and few actors can boast of such a wide-ranging and superlative filmography.

And kudos to him for still speaking out about the blacklist. There is a worrisome effort to rehabilitate the blacklist these days, and it is good that we still have people who, like Douglas, lived through it and are still willing to remind us of what it was.

And by the way his autobio, “The Ragman’s Son”, totally rocks. He had a great anecdote in there about John Wayne taking him aside after a screening of “Lust For Life” and saying something like, “Kirk, what are ya doin’ playing a weakling like Van Gogh? We’re supposed to be tough guys!”

Some other good ones:

Seven Days in May
Last Train From Gun Hill
The Bad and the Beautiful
Man Without a Star
Champion
Out of the Past
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

They don’t even make titles like most of these any more.

Paths of Glory is not only my favorite Kirk Douglas film - it also consistently makes my top 10 list of all-time favorites.

Excuse me while I go make some additions to my Neflix rental queue.