I have to admit that Kirk Douglas is NOT my favourite actor by any means but have to admit that he was in some good Westerns. He was good as Doc Holliday in ‘Gunfight at the OK Corral’ but nowhere as good as Victor Mature in the same role a decade earlier in ‘My Darling Clementine’

However when you look at Kirk Douglas’ life you have to admire how he was able to emerge from real poverty to achieve the success that he did in his very long life

He was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, born Issur Danielovitch Demsky in Amsterdam, New York. He grew up poor, but was a fine student and gifted athlete. An acting scholarship got him into the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and he appeared in a few minor Broadway roles before joining the Navy in 1941.

He got a real break when he won the lead role in the 1946 picture The Strange Love Of Martha Ivers.

In the 1950s, as television took hold and this saw effectively the end of the Hollywood studio system.

Film stars began developing their own films, often backed by the studios. With the formation of Bryna Productions, Kirk Douglas was one of the first to set up shop. (Bryna was his mother’s first name.)

The Indian Fighter ABOVE

Backed by United Artists, Douglas opened a small Bryna office in Beverly Hills in 1955, with The Indian Fighter the company’s first release. I remember that he had personally picked out Elsa Martinelli as his co-star – she had little or no experience in films but she looked very beautiful. Apparently it is reported that it was Kirk’s wife who spotted her for the film

I remember seeing the film in the Cinema and it was in Wide Screen of course and terrific Technicolor. It looked so good.

Elsa Martinelli
(January 30, 1935 – July 8, 2017)

Elsa Martinelli was an Italian model and actress. She was “introduced” in The Indian Fighter (1955), which was produced by its star, Kirk Douglas, and directed by Andre de Toth.

Italian actress Elsa Martinelli, who starred opposite Kirk Douglas in the 1955 Western “The Indian Fighter” and went on to gain international recognition working with such directors as Mario Monicelli, Roger Vadim, Orson Welles, Howard Hawkes, and Elio Petri, died Saturday 8 July 2017 in Rome at the age of 82.

Born in the Tuscan city of Grosseto, Martinelli moved to Rome in the early 1950s and started a career as a model. She soon appeared in “Vogue” and “Life,” which is where she was noticed by Kirk Douglas’ wife, Anne Buydens.

Martinelli made her acting debut in 1954 in the Stendhal adaptation “Le Rouge et le Noir,” directed by France’s Claude Autant-Lara. But her breakthrough role came the following year in Andre de Toth’s “The Indian Fighter,” which Douglas produced.

Elsa Martinelli went on to alternating roles in European and U.S. productions,

Over the course of his career, Kirk Douglas made some fine Westerns. Howard Hawks’ The Big Sky in 1952. Man Without A Star in 1955. John Sturges’ Gunfight At The O.K. Corral from 1957, with Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Douglas as Doc Holliday — and its sister film, Last Train From Gun Hill. He appeared with Rock Hudson in The Last Sunset, directed by Robert Aldrich, in 1962. 

Lonely Are The Brave, a modern-day Western from 1962, is always named as Kirk’s favourite of his own movies.