Kirk Douglas as a high school senior.

In the beginning of his legendary career, Kirk Douglas (1916 – ) b. Issur Danielovitch, was almost typecast as a well-meaning but ineffectual husband as in, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, 1946, and A Letter to Three Wives, 1949.  But his career exploded into mega-stardom when he played bitter, cynical heroes motivated by rage: Champion, 1949, Ace in the Hole, 1951, The Bad and the Beautiful, 1952, Paths of Glory, 1957, Spartacus, 1960, and his favorite film Lonely Are the Brave, 1962,

Douglas was never a conventional leading man. Though handsome as a fairy tale prince he wielded his masculine beauty like a weapon. There was none of the gruff charm that made Gable the King of Hollywood, nor was Douglas an elegant, urbane gentleman like William Powell.

He excelled at playing, in his own words, “sons of bitches.”

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Picture a quaint Victorian house in the Hollywood Hills overlooking Los Angeles.  A modest insurance salesman shows up at the door, it is opened by a maid.  There is a beautiful woman at the top of the stairs; the sultry Mrs. Dietrichson, dressed in nothing more than a towel.  She gets dressed after the salesman tells her their car insurance doesn’t have them “fully covered.”

The following conversation takes place:

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The fast, witty, and flirtatious dialogue in this scene gives us light into how a man could possibly get seduced into what was to come.  This is of course, the big murder/insurance scam from Billy Wilder’s classic 1944 film Double Indemnity.

There was a time when dark crime films were popular both with mainstream Hollywood films and B-grade productions. McCarthyism, Hollywood censorship, and World War II among other things all played a role in the shaping and growing popularity of what became known as the classic period of America’s film noir (1940’s-1950’s). (more…)