Lonely Are the Brave (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by T. R. Delapa

Produced by Edward Lewis; directed by David Miller; screenplay by Dalton Trumbo; cinematography by Philip Lathrop; edited by Leon Barsha; production design by Alexander Golitzen; music by Jerry Goldsmith; starring Kirk Douglas, Gena Rowlands, Walter Matthau, Michael Kane, William Schallert, and Carroll O’Connor; Blu-ray or DVD, B&W, 107 min., 1962. A Kino Lorber release.

Halfway into the lofty, uneven trail blazed by Lonely Are the Brave, keep a lookout for a fleeting close-up that catches the essence of Kirk Douglas, Movie Star. As misfit cowboy Jack Burns in what the late, legendary actor called his favorite role, Douglas leans on a window ledge, chomping at the bit to bust out of jail, after trying—and failing—to persuade his boyhood buddy to escape with him. The friend explains that he has a family he’s now responsible for, unlike the wild and rootless Jack, whose only real home is on the range. Handsomely profiled against the night sky, Douglas turns around and amiably says, “I understand,” giving his amigo a wink and beaming smile from that chiseled, jut-jawed, famously dimpled face.

Douglas, who died this past February at the remarkable age of 103, may have been the last bona fide matinee idol from Hollywood’s classic era (we also lost centenarian Olivia de Havilland in 2020). But that doesn’t mean he’s ridden off into the cinematic sunset, not with Kino Lorber’s exceptionally timely Lonely Are the Brave Blu-ray release. While this low-budget, black-and-white, 1962 post-Western is in many ways the antithesis of Douglas’s signature blockbuster Spartacus, you could also see it as the flip side of the same coin, showing off the kind of lustrous leading man presence seldom in circulation today.

The Kino release comes with an enthusiastic and informative audio commentary by filmmakers Howard S. Berger and Steve Mitchell, as well as poignant 2009 interviews with Douglas, actor/producer son Michael, co-star Gena Rowlands, and Steven Spielberg (whose smash TV directing debut, Duel, clearly had Brave in its rear-view mirror).  

In a different breed of bonus, observers will also find the specter of another postwar Hollywood notable in the shadows, off-camera—namely, scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo, arguably the best-known of the blacklisted “Hollywood Ten” members, found guilty of contempt and jailed during the late 1940s and 1950s congressional anti-communist “witch hunts.” When Jack’s friend glumly tells him that he’s done running from the law and is resigned to his sentence, Trumbo’s dialogue ricochets back to the short list of brave witnesses, long cast of victims—and the many flag-waving scoundrels—from those inquisitional dark days. In the acidic words of Orson Welles, those who informed on their colleagues and “named names,” from the studio brass on down, “didn’t do so to save their lives, but to save their swimming pools.” 

It’s safe to say, however, that director David Miller was no Stanley Kubrick, the protoperfectionist auteur whom Douglas recruited for Spartacus once Anthony Mann was let go with an epic thumbs down. Both films were projects that originated in Douglas’s own Bryna Productions, one of the growing number of cottage film companies set up in the 1950s just as the old Hollywood studio system was doing a pretty fair impression of the fall of the Roman Empire.  

A journeyman director whom Douglas would later rip in his bawdy 1988 Ragman’s Son memoir, Miller’s handling of Lonely Are the Brave is competent, yet commonplace and arid in patches, leaving Douglas and the overall fine cast—Rowlands especially—to ride circles around him. In light of Miller’s haphazard grip, cinematographer Philip Lathrop picks up the slack, coming to the rescue with nimble camerawork, striking chiaroscuro night shots, and impressive location work under harsh conditions in the mountains outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Film and TV buffs should ride herd on the fortuitous casting, which previews a fistful of 1960s-and-beyond acting stalwarts: Walter Matthau as the bored, jaded sheriff who half-heartedly tracks Jack down; Rowlands, whose fame would come later in trailblazing independent films directed by her husband, John Cassavetes; a pre-Archie Bunker Carroll O’Connor, playing a long-haul truck driver whose destiny blindly intersects with Jack’s road less traveled; George Kennedy, in a test-drive of his many bankable roles as pugnacious heavy; and even William Schallert, whose face (and voice) would be featured in hundreds of TV shows and commercials until his death in 2016.

But there’s no question the shining star in this constellation is Douglas, at age forty-four then in his prime as cool, confident, leathery leading man. Not only does he snugly fit the part in his denim and cowboy boots, he’s the warmest of Western anti-heroes, a fast draw with a self-deprecating joke and only a fighter of last resort. In fact, our first look at Jack is him taking a little nap on the prairie, grabbing some shut-eye next to New Mexico sagebrush and his willful steed feeding nearby. This could be the start of any classic Ford, Hawks, or Raoul Walsh Western, but no, Jack’s siesta is dashed by the unearthly sound of fighter jets above, spewing vapor trails behind them. This is the introduction to Jack’s own Twilight Zone, where the old is stampeded by the new, and sundown on this changing Western landscape leads only to darkness.

Lonely Are the Brave began its screen journey as The Brave Cowboy, a 1956 novel by Edward Abbey, author of such later best-selling environmentalist tracts as The Monkey Wrench Gang. While Trumbo’s script covers much of the source territory, drastically compacted, he made telling changes, one of the most significant being Jack’s friend’s crimes. On the page, Paul (a dim Michael Kane) is en route to prison for draft evasion, while on screen his two-year hitch is punishment for helping illegal Mexican immigrants once in “El Norte.” With that (ever timely) detour, Trumbo bends it into a thematic turn: Jack’s nemesis isn’t anyone in particular but rather the whole land-grabbing notion of geographic borders and boundaries. “The true Westerner hates fences,” he declares to Paul’s perplexed wife Jerri (Rowlands). With that, Jack is keen on cutting barbed-wire fences, breaking out of jails, and, eventually, crossing a busy modern highway not built for him—or his horse. 

Jack not only goes mano-a-mano with man-made land borders (i.e., that socialist bugaboo, private property, in excelsis); he also makes a quixotic last stand against another creeping Western intruder: technology. If Jack’s the self-professed “natural man” on horseback, he’s butting heads against a modernizing new West of automobiles, helicopters, jets, radios, and telephones, all of which—sometimes loudly so—are cast as the black hats in Abbey’s wistful fable. These newfangled conveniences are constant interrupters, belch smoke and noise, and frighten wildlife, the worst offender being O’Connor’s ominous, if not monstrous, tractor-trailer. No Pony Express driver racing to Duke City (aka Albuquerque), he’s hauling a full load of toilets, perhaps to a gated Sun Belt subdivision. Abbey and Trumbo’s heavy-duty metaphor on the battle between new and old gets a finer treatment when Jack rides by a backdrop of junk cars, all undigested waste from the throwaway consumerism of twentieth-century American life.

Jack’s “don’t fence me in” credo is inexorably tied to his private life, which hints at a knotty past romance with Jerri, who ultimately hitched her wagon to home-sweet-home security rather than Jack’s nomadic ways. An alluring beacon for marriage and family, she chides Jack for his boyish sense of rebellion. “Either you play by the rules or you lose,” she warns. Jack might be a lonesome cowboy but he’s also a starry-eyed dreamer, galloping to a different drum. He hatches a plan to get into jail the hard way, sure he can cajole Paul into a joint breakout. The rub is he has to start a barroom brawl and land in the pokey, the first putting him in the crosshairs of a one-armed veteran with a murky, 100-proof hatred of cowboys.

At this fork in the road Trumbo slugs in his 1930s brand of leftist social philosophy. Jack and Paul’s “cell” includes a cross-section of Southwest proletariat, including two Native Americans, all who communally pitch in to help Jack’s good-if-not-great escape. He may be the mastermind with the smuggled saw blade, but everyone lends a hand, breaking another border to freedom. Earlier, in the holding cell, Lathrop’s camera sinuously dollies with Jack and Paul as they walk through their fellow wanted—and unwanted—men. One arrested hobo futilely complains to his jailer, “Just because I got no money, that’s a crime?”

With Kennedy lurking as Gutierrez, their obscurely accented jailer, you may have flashbacks (or flash-forwards) to his defining role in 1967’s Cool Hand Luke, playing Paul Newman’s chain gang bully-turned-brethren. Indeed, I reckon you can follow the bittersweet scent of Lonely Are the Brave to a whole pack of fatalistic Sixties and Seventies dramas that depict social defiance and rebellion as something of lost cause, often violently so, including weighty touchstones like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider and on to the mean LA streets of Chinatown.

Up to and including Jack’s impish antics breaking into jail, Lonely Are the Brave could pass as borderline comedy, gently punching holes in the Western genre à la Lee Marvin’s Oscar-winning Cat Ballou three years later. But from then on, the film hightails it into wistful revisionism, neck-and-neck with that crowded early Sixties field of The Misfits, Hud, Ride the High Country, and even John Ford’s myth-busting The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. While old-school Westerns were still alive and shooting (e.g., 1962’s elephantine Cinerama pastiche How the West Was Won), the genre was under fire, with the cowboy posed as either stunted anachronism or toothless old timer unable to face the complexities—or the corruption—of an encroaching modern world. (Soon enough, as the reins of censorship came loose in the mid-Sixties, Sergio Leone’s amoral “Spaghetti Western” loner would swagger into the bloody breach, with Sam Peckinpah’s nihilistic The Wild Bunch in hot pursuit.)

Elsewhere, Trumbo (or uncredited producer Douglas) mutes Abbey’s libertarian politics, erasing the book’s redbaiting “anarchist” label branded on Jack by the law. If anything, Burns on screen is crossbred between a “This Land is Your Land” Woody Guthrie lefty and a Roman stoic on loan-out from Spartacus, hardly flinching whether suffering a gunshot wound to the leg or a beating administered by the nasty Gutierrez.

Miller’s dramatically up-and-down last act highlights the cast and crew’s heady location work, tracking Jack as he makes his way up a mountain ridge, coaxing his skittish mare Whisky with him. This is Miller, well, cutting to the chase, but one gets the sinking feeling that Jack’s future is behind him. For now he is truly alone, forced to leave his closest human companions back in the dust. As he climbs the ridge, fending off the high-tech assaults of his pursuers, including an inhuman helicopter, the local sheriff (Matthau) hangs back, mutters to himself, and watches his dopey deputies making like Barney Fife instead of Marshall Dillon. While the realism moves convincingly on the ground, directorial bravery escapes Miller in the helicopter insert shots (that’s Bill Bixby as a cocky pilot), which are so heavy in low-tech rear projection that they drag down what should be a bracingly naturalistic climax.

For a film that gets its giddy-up from the Western and all its white-hat heroes from Gary Cooper and John Wayne to Alan Ladd’s Shane, it’s not too wild to see its ending as a doubling back to the Hollywood gangster film. As Jack and Whisky make their steep getaway, your mind might wander due west to Walsh’s 1941 High Sierra, with Humphrey Bogart as Roy Earle, another outlaw out of his time and existentially desperate to “crash out” while surrounded by coppers on a California mountainside.  

Well, at least Bogie didn’t face the indignity of getting flushed out of hiding by a runaway load of commodes (from “Acme” no less). That’s not exactly how Jack and Whisky sidle into their last roundup, but it’s grim nonetheless, shockingly and perhaps needlessly so. Of course, Kirk Douglas, Movie Star, in no way went prematurely into that good Hollywood night. He had a full, famed, lucrative career, as laudable for his humanitarian efforts as for his sixty-plus years of screen credits, from his debut in 1946 to his semi-independent production house that helped “break the blacklist” and on to his last hurrah in 2008, including such gems as Out of the Past, Lust for Life, Champion, and Paths of Glory.

All hail Kirk Douglas, alias Issur Danielovitch. Make no mistake, he was Spartacus.

Thomas Delapa teaches film and media studies at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor and Detroit’s College for Creative Studies.

Copyright © 2020 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 1