Pun Salad

Of all the movies Kirk Douglas has made, this is his favorite. It's also his son's, Michael's, favorite. Myself, I gotta go with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Kirk plays John W. "Jack" Burns, cowboy. In a neat trick, the movie opens with a vast open wild horizon, Jack at a campsite with his horse, Whiskey. It's a Western! But then you hear roaring, and Jack looks up to spy three jet contrails overhead; it turns out that it's set sometime in the mid-twentieth century. And Jack's very much a man out of time, as the forces of civilization are closing in on the last remnants of the wild west.

The plot relates Jack's final struggle with The System, as his old buddy Paul has been jailed for helping wetbacks. (Yes, I know that's not PC, but that's what they say in the movie.) By judicious picking of fights, Jack manages to break into the jail where Paul's being held. He proposes a breakout, but Paul's decided that the outlaw life is no longer for him. So Jack escapes alone, and becomes a wanted fugitive.

There's much to like about the movie: there are a lot of familiar faces with a lot of acting talent: Gena Rowlands plays Paul's wife, Walter Matthau, William Schallert, and George Kennedy as pursuing cops. Carrol O'Connor as a truck driver. And even Bill Bixby has a small role as a chopper pilot.

Also Bill Raisch, the original one-armed murderer from The Fugitive, plays… well, a violent one-armed man here too. Man, did that guy ever get typecast or what? (He was in Spartacus too, credited as "Soldier Whose Arm is Hacked Off". Ouch!)

The movie has a Dalton Trumbo screenplay, based on a novel by noted civilization-hater Edward Abbey. Don't want to spoil things, but it's kind of a downer, and more than a little heavy-handed.

The DVD has a little documentary at the end, with Kirk Douglas himself reminiscing in a couple places. His speech is heavily stroke-impaired, but he still has a pretty good sense of humor, wise-cracking about his scene-stealing horse, Whiskey. And even now, he's blogging away at MySpace at 92 years of age. God bless him.