Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster

(On Cable TV, September 2021) I’m going to keep this review short, considering how banal The Devil’s Disciple actually is once you get past its few flourishes. It’s true that I may have gone into the film with too-high expectations:  As a drama featuring no less than Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster with a supporting turn for Laurence Olivier, I had some hope that their acting talent could carry the picture through its humdrum revolutionary war setting. This is only partially true: Olivier is fun to watch in a role designed to steal attention from the two leads through acerbic dialogue, but Douglas and Lancaster, as able as they are, can’t quite save the result from growing boredom. The other element of note in the film is the stop-motion opening and interstitial segments — they’re still remarkably fun to see even today in black-and-white, but as soon as the image dissolves to live action, a bit of the film’s interest goes with it. There are much, much better Lancaster/Douglas pairing out there than The Devil’s Disciple even if they have blander titles.