I was a percussionist from earliest childhood. Many of my mother's photos show a six year-old who looks uncannily like me in the backyard surrounded by coffee cans with a pair of sticks cut from nearby trees in his hands, gleefully banging away. I am as a result (perhaps I have cause and effect reversed here) acutely sensitive to rhythms, no matter their source or manifestation. The rhythm of motion pictures in those days was a more stately cadence, and it was tightly interwoven with the plot itself. As the sensibilities of directors and the movie-going public evolved during and after the social revolutions of the Vietnam era, the rhythms of movies changed in concert.
The 70s brought more staccato to the movies, but they also introduced profound cacophony. Polyphonic percussion is very effective and stirring, so long as it is carefully orchestrated. Much of the cinematic output of this era was not. It was a hodgepodge of unrelated timbres and percussive motifs that served only to disturb and disorient the audience. This may well have been the effect that the directors were after, but to me it left the movie fragmented and without coherence. I came away from those films, in a word, unsatisfied. The disjointed rhythmic dissonance was unfulfilling and cast whatever point the director was trying to make in a harsh, stuttering light.
There will never be another Kirk Douglas. He and his ilk are relics of a past cinematic era, when good guys and bad guys were easy to tell apart, and the plot lines flowed seamlessly, fluidly, from one predictable scene to the next. Their predictability, as I have said, was not a drawback; rather it was an affirmation of the social contract between studios, actors, and the movie-going public. While I love the flash-bang frenetics of today's films, bipolar and schizophrenic though they are, there was something deeply comforting about the movies of Douglas' time: they were quite simply good for the soul.
Happy birthday, Kirk. If there is an afterlife, you'll have a whale of a tale to tell.
