The Final Cut

I guess I've been a movie buff since I was knee high to a grasshopper. That saying alone gives you a clue of my age. The phrase goes back to 1814 and its first form was knee high to a toad.

I'm not that old, but I'm old enough to remember every film which included movie icons Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford and Kirk Douglas.

Douglas, 102, is no longer performing and just maybe Redford and Eastwood have recently made their final cut -- Redford with his latest release of The Old Man and the Gun and Eastwood's The Mule.

My goodness, Redford is 82 and Eastwood is 88. Watching Redford and Eastwood perform will take your breath away. Yes, for their brilliant acting, but the fact the two actors no longer leap off the screen and instead make painstaking moves from one scene to another.

As I watch the two brilliant actors perform, my mind wanders off screen and I visualize a young Redford from The Way We Were in a scene with Barbara Streisand on a cold wintry day in New York or a no holes barred scene with Eastwood corralling the bad guys in Hang 'Em High and sending them to Judge Fenton (Pat Hingle) for justice.

As for Douglas, I can recall all of his films like the 1955 Western Man Without a Star, a King Vidor film with Claire Trevor and Jeanne Crain and a more modern-day Western Lonely are the Brave, a 1962 film about a man and his horse -- the main character John W Burns who refuses to join modern society, while his horse is along for the ride.

The Cinema will never be the same without those larger than life actors.