I’m Spartacus!” – “I’m Spartacus!” – “I’M SPARTACUS!” Every film buff knows that moment, every panel-show comedian riffs on it. A mob of defeated slave rebels in the pre-Christian Roman empire is told their wretched lives will be spared, but only if their ringleader, Spartacus (Kirk Douglas), comes out and gives himself up to be executed. Just as he is about to sacrifice himself, one slave, Antoninus (Tony Curtis) jumps up and claims to be Spartacus, then another, and another, then all of them, a magnificent display of solidarity, while the man himself allows a tear to fall in closeup.

This variant on the Christian myth – in the face of crucifixion, Spartacus’s disciples do not deny him – is a pointed political fiction. In real life, Spartacus was killed on the battlefield. The screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, the blacklisted author who had to work under aliases and found no solidarity in Hollywood. Yet Douglas himself, as the film’s producer, stood up for Trumbo. He put Trumbo’s real name in the credits, and ended the McCarthy-ite hysteria.

Kirk Douglas in SpartacusHe’s Spartacus: Douglas in his most famous role.The main reason the scene is so potent is its extraordinary irony. Who on earth could claim to be Spartacus when Spartacus looked like that? Douglas is a one-man Hollywood Rushmore, almost hyperreal in his masculinity. He is the movie-world’s Colossus of Rhodes, a figure of pure-granite maleness yet with something feline, and a sinuous, gravelly voice. Douglas is a heart-on-sleeve actor, mercurial and excitable; he has played tough guys and vulnerable guys, heroes and villains. And, as a pioneering producer, he brought two Stanley Kubrick films to the screen: Spartacus (he hired Kubrick to replace Anthony Mann) and his first world war classic Paths of Glory in which he was superb, playing a principled French army officer.

One hundred years ago today, Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch, the son of a Moscow-born Russian Jewish ragman, in upstate New York. An uncle had been killed in the pogroms at home. In his 1988 memoir, The Ragman’s Son, Douglas describes the casual antisemitism he faced almost throughout his career. Rebranding yourself with a Waspy stage-name was what actors – and immigrants in general – had to do in America to survive and thrive.

After a start on the Broadway stage, he made his screen reputation playing the driven fighter Midge Kelly in the exhilarating boxing movie Champion (1949), which earned him the first of his three Oscar nominations. Champion has stunning images and a notable slo-mo scene: it is much admired by Martin Scorsese and transparently an influence on Raging Bull. In Detective Story (1951), directed by William Wyler, Douglas gives a grandstanding star turn in a melodrama set in a police station, playing the vindictive, violent McLeod, an officer with an awful secret. It was a movie that laid down the template for all cop TV shows, including The Streets of San Francisco, which was to star Douglas’s son Michael.
But it was in Ace in the Hole (1951), directed by Billy Wilder, that Douglas gives his first classic performance: the sinister newspaper reporter Chuck Tatum, who prolongs the ordeal of a man trapped in a cave to create a better story. He is an electrifying villain in that film, a Phineas T Barnum of media untruth. At one stage he slaps the wife of the trapped man (whom he is also seducing) because she wasn’t sufficiently demure and sad-looking for his purposes, like an imperious film director looking for a better performance. He is also brilliant in Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) as Jonathan Shields, the diabolically persuasive movie producer who betrays everyone.
Arguably, it is in Paths of Glory (1958) that Douglas finds his finest hour as the tough, principled Colonel Dax, who stands up to the callous and incompetent senior officers of the high command. Douglas’s handsome, unsmiling face is set like a bayonet of contempt.
Douglas himself prizes his sensitive and Oscar-nominated performance as Vincent van Gogh in another Vincente Minnelli film, Lust for Life, from 1956. Some may smile a little at this earnest and high-minded movie now, but it is very watchable, with a heartfelt belief that Van Gogh’s art can be understood by everyone. There is a bold, passionate performance from Douglas, who simply blazes with agony. Not everyone liked it. John Wayne famously stormed up to Douglas after a screening to rage: “Christ, Kirk, how can you play a part like that? There’s so goddamn few of us left. We got to play tough, strong characters. Not those weak queers!”
Douglas has endured a scene of almost Freudian trauma in his career. Having bought the rights to Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in the 1960s, he himself played the lead for its Broadway adaptation: McMurphy, the subversive wild-man imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital.
PROC. BY MOVIES

Hondo actor John Wayne had plenty of actors over the career he enjoyed working with. However, there were others that brought out a whole other side of him. Wayne detested his Hondo co-star, Geraldine Page, who he couldn’t stop complaining about. The men didn’t treat her well on the set, but she ultimately shocked her fellow cast members when she earned an Oscar nomination for her performance.

Hondo follows an Army dispatch rider named Hondo Lane (Wayne). He discovers a young mother named Angie Lowe (Page) and her son, Johnny (Lee Aaker), living near Apache warriors. However, Hondo finds himself having to become the mother and son’s protector as he travels across an isolated piece of land in Apache territory.

The 1953 film is based on Lous L’Amour’s short story “The Gift of Cochise” released the year prior. John Farrow directs from James Edward Grant’s screenplay, but John Ford also directed some final scenes.

Pilar Wayne and Alex Thorleifson’s John Wayne: My Life With the Duke told the frustrations Wayne had with his Hondo co-star, Page. However, he took it upon himself to act upon his complaints. Wayne was already on edge when Pilar couldn’t be on the set.

Page was a “New York-nurtured” stage actor, rather than the “movie star” type that Wayne was familiar with.
“She may have been great on Broadway, but she didn’t know a damn thing about making movies,” Wayne said. “I don’t know where some of these arty New York theater people get their manners. Would you believe she sat down at dinner one night and ate her mashed potatoes with her fingers?”
Wayne explained that Page “didn’t care much for makeup–or soap and water for that matter.” As a result of his frustrations over her table manners, he dumped his entire dinner plate over her head, shouting, “And I’m not sorry!”
Ford further provoked the situation when he forced Wayne and Page to reshoot a Hondo love scene. The filmmaker didn’t think that audiences could believe “a handsome man like Duke could be in love with such a homely woman.” Wayne responded, “Damn him. Shooting that scene the first time was bad enough.”
Wayne, Ford, and Farrow put Page in the situation where they added lines to make it more “believable” that the two characters would fall in love. “They told her to look into Duke’s eyes adoringly, and murmur, ‘I know I’m a homely woman, but I love you.’” Naturally, Page was angry with the trio of men.
Wayne had a rotten experience working on Hondo with Page. However, it really rubbed salt in the wound for him when she went on to earn her first Oscar nomination for her performance. She would lose the statue that year to Donna Reed in From Here to Eterenity.
Nevertheless, Page would continue with an impressive career with plenty more appearances at the Academy Awards. She would earn another six Oscar acting nominations over the next 30 years. Page received her first win for 1985’s The Trip to Bountiful.
Wayne and Page both only won a single Oscar over the course of their careers, but she certainly has him beat when it comes to nominations.
 
BY MOVIES

John Wayne and His GunsWayne was an extra and played an unnamed American officer in the 1928 World War I silent film Four Sons, but he was never seen holding a firearm despite the film’s wartime setting. He continued to have bit parts, many of which were uncredited, until he starred in the 1930 film The Big Trail. Largely overlooked today, the film still deemed to be “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress in 2006 and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

It also marked the first time Wayne carried a firearm on screen; in this case an Enfield Pattern 1853, a percussion fired rifled musket that saw use in the Crimean War and later in the American Civil War. In the film, Wayne’s character—a young trapper and scout—also carried a Remington 1858 New Army. He never used either weapon again, however.

The Single Action ArmyOf the firearms that John Wayne used the most in movies, nothing even comes close to the Colt 1873 Single Action Army Revolver, which appeared in some 25 films. While not the first to use the infamous revolver in a movie – that would be the unnamed “Bandit” in 1903’s The Great Train Robbery – Wayne was arguably the first household name to use the Single Action Army in a film, it was in 1931’s The Range Feud.

Over the nearly five decades following that film, the Duke carried Single Action Army Revolvers. He carried them in such films as The Trail Beyond (1934), Red River (1948), Rio Grande (1950), Hondo (1953) and The Sons of Katie Elder (1965).He also carried the revolver as Deputy U.S. Marshal Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn in his Oscar winning performance True Grit, as well as in the sequel Rooster Cogburn. It’s also fitting that his character carries a “Great Western Revolver”; it’s a specially engraved replica made especially for Wayne, in his final movie The Shootist (1976).

The Winchester Model 1892The Winchester Model 1892 was first seen in the 1939 film Stagecoach. Winchester’s rifle—notably the large lever loop version—has become practically synonymous with Wayne. The lever-action repeating rifle, which the legendary John Browning designed to be a smaller and lighter version of the large-frame Model 1886, is almost always an anachronism, but because of Wayne it was associated with Hollywood westerns for decades.
Wayne used the Winchester Model 1892 in a dozen films. The Saddle Ring Carbine version appeared about half of the time.
As with the Colt Single Action Army, Winchester’s rifle appeared in some of the Duke’s most remembered and beloved films. Those include Red River, The Searchers (1953), True Grit and The Shootist.
Only in a few films did Wayne ever use the more period correct rifles. A good example is the Winchester Model 1866 “Yellow Boy,” which appears in the 1948 film Fort Apache. Meanwhile, he used a Springfield Model 1873 Cavalry Carbine in Red River. However, those are the exceptions, and while not historically accurate, Wayne just seems correct carrying the Model 1892.
John Wayne With Military GunsIn addition to being known for playing U.S. Marshals and other lawmen—as well as gun fighters and cowboys—in countless westerns, Wayne’s character roster also included many war films. As noted, his first role was playing a U.S. military officer during the First World War. However, it was during the Second World War that he made the transition to portraying a modern soldier.
In 1944’s The Fighting Seabees, Wayne carried a Colt M1911A1 .45 pistol and Springfield M1903A3 rifle. Meanwhile, in 1949’s Sands of Iwo Jima he first carried and actually fired an M1 Garand. Wayne carried the M1 Garand again, but never fired it in the 1962 World War II epic The Longest Day.
The Green BeretsBy the end of the 1960s, John Wayne had the somewhat dubious distinction of appearing in The Green Berets. It was the only Vietnam War film to have the full support of the U.S. military.
The film essentially comes off as a western with the Viet Cong taking the role of the American Indians attacking a besieged frontier outpost. In the film, Wayne carries an XM16E1; it’s the Army variant of the original M16 (SP1).
PROC. BY MOVIES