Kirk Douglas's dark debut film: The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

ONE of the surviving stars of Hollywood's golden era, Kirk Douglas, now 96, lives in retirement in Florida.

Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon in The Apartment.

ONE of the surviving stars of Hollywood's golden era, Kirk Douglas, now 96, lives in retirement in Florida.

He is on record as saying, after a stroke damaged his voice 15 years ago, "What does an actor do when he can't speak? Give up? No, I wait around for the return of silent pictures." One of his last appearances was in the Australian horse saga The Man from Snowy River, but he's best remembered for such classics as Spartacus, Paths of Glory and Seven Days in May.

You can see him this week in his first film, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Thursday, 2.05am, ABC1), a quintessential 1940s noir directed by Lewis Milestone. Douglas plays the district attorney of a small Pennsylvania town who is running for mayor, knowing his rich and ambitious wife (Barbara Stanwyck) once committed a murder. The cast includes Van Heflin, Lizabeth Scott and Judith Anderson. Dark, perverse and cynically engrossing.

The same noir flavour can be found in Body Heat (Saturday, 12.10am, Nine), Lawrence Kasdan's superior erotic thriller with William Hurt and Kathleen Turner. In Kasdan's screenplay, Hurt's dimwitted attorney becomes infatuated with Turner's sultry femme fatale, who wants her husband dead. The plot carries strong reminders of Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, which starred Fred MacMurray and is rated by this column the greatest of all noir thrillers.

Wilder directed MacMurray again in The Apartment (Monday, 1.10am, ABC1), a bitter-sweet comic masterpiece released in 1960, in which Jack Lemmon's mild-mannered insurance clerk rises through the ranks by lending his apartment as a meeting place for his philandering office superiors. Among the latter is MacMurray's odious JD Sheldrake, who is having an affair with Shirley MacLaine's pert elevator girl. MacLaine has done nothing better.

Charles Bean, the Australian war correspondent who wrote the official history of Australia's role in World War I, was commemorated in a dramatised TV documentary, Charles Bean's Great War, shown in 2010. Bean was respected for his scholarship, his intrepid work on the frontline and his sympathetic understanding of the ordinary soldier.

Probably his closest American counterpart was Ernie Pyle, considered the greatest of US World War II combat correspondents. In The Story of G.I. Joe (Sunday, 1.40am, ABC1), Pyle is played by Burgess Meredith, who captures all of Pyle's humanity and compassion, but it's Robert Mitchum's tough US army officer who goes close to stealing the show. This fascinating study of men at war, directed by William A. Wellman, was released in 1945, while the war was still raging. Pyle was killed in the South Pacific before he could see the film.

BEST ON SHOW

The Apartment (M)
4.5 stars
Monday, 1.10am, ABC1

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (M)
4 stars
Thursday, 2.05am, ABC1

Body Heat (MA15+)
3.5 stars
Saturday, 12.10am, Nine