On the High Wire with Kirk Douglas

You can say he embodied the vibrating, undisguisable sense of suppressed panic that characterized the fifties and early sixties, before the counterculture invited a more open style of acting and of being and, alongside this, a more subversive notion of heroism. In the late sixties he began to seem inescapably obvious, uncool. Michael Douglas, his own son and near-doppelgänger, bypassed him when producing the film adaptation of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), handing Jack Nicholson the coveted role Kirk had played onstage. (How could Douglas compete with Nicholson’s seductive sarcasm, his lethally relaxed aggression?)

Douglas was authentically savage, raging, tormented. David Thomson aptly called him Dostoyevskian in his capacity to express agony and anguish, to reliably play out escalating stages of a nervous breakdown. In time this could seem stale, strained. There was little peace or grace in him, but rather an athlete’s charged receptivity to action, to sheer intensity. He was like a racehorse unable to simply walk. 

But have you seen The Story of Three Loves? (A three-part MGM anthology film from 1953, in opulently shadowed Technicolor. “This,” the trailer tells us, “is the story of hearts—the strong, the gentle, the demanding, the generous.”) Douglas stars as a death-defying, death-haunted trapeze artist in Equilibrium, the most neurotic/erotic episode. In the scenes on the high wire, you feel his unique physical assurance, strength, courage. In the lines of his body and the coiled, glittering quality in his eyes. These scenes are thrillingly well done. The camera keeps a graceful distance, the soundtrack is emptied of music. You hear the clicking and knocking of ropes, the trapeze, the knock and click and the sense of open air that bodies can fall into, the unmistakably fatal open space. (Gottfried Reinhardt is the film’s director. My memory tells me Douglas did his own stunts. He convinces you that he’s doing his own stunts.) 

The story opens with Douglas rescuing a young woman, Pier Angeli, from drowning in the Seine, a suicide attempt. In time, she’ll become his apprentice and lover. He recruits her because he understands she has no fear; she’s in despair, feels she has nothing to lose. When he visits her in the hospital, their future is projected in what isn’t directly expressed. The dialogue is chiseled and spare in the manner of Hemingway, except Hemingwayesque dialogue in movies is seldom so convincing, so strong.