A Lovely Way to Die (1968)

(On Cable TV, March 2021) As much as I enjoy discovering the past classics of cinema, sometimes there’s no substitute for the kind of downmarket low-brow genre picture that more clearly reflects the quirks of its time than the timeless classics. Which brings us to A Lovely Way to Die, a slightly-trashy neo-noir swingin’ detective film best qualified as obscure. Whatever claim to an enduring legacy it has is solely in the casting: With none other than Kirk Douglas playing the lead character, the film automatically becomes more interesting. It doesn’t take much more than a few moments into the film, with its bombastic musical score and depiction of Douglas as a manly late-1960s renegade police detective, to realize what kind of film we’re getting — a type of film that would mutate in blaxploitation, but clearly belongs to its time. Dimpled-jawed Douglas plays the protagonist exactly like he should: without subtlety and with reactionary zeal, anticipating Eastwood’s Dirty Harry by two years. The plot is a murky concoction of matrimonial murder gussied up in tough-guy detective thriller, with Douglas smouldering so intensely that none of the female characters can resist him for long. Mostly shot in a vast mansion, the film does make its way to a courtroom in time for the third act. Douglas is a delight here, but maybe not for the right reasons — seeing a progressive icon like him play a reactionary tough cop who quits the force after bristling at criticism of his brutal methods is amusing, and having him being roughly twenty years too old for the part is additional material for hilarity. A Lovely Way to Die itself is average, but it’s the late-1960s quirks that make it special.