The Big Picture

Lonely Are the Brave challenges our perceptions of the cowboy figure in a modern setting, highlighting the disconnect between romanticized ideals and the reality of a homeless man. The film explores themes of alienation and the refusal to conform to the modern world, ultimately showing that rugged individualism is not enough to achieve collective good. Lonely Are the Brave is a precursor to modern Neo-Westerns, highlighting the clash between brutal modern reality and historical mythology.

The story opens with a familiar scene. A Cowboy rests on a wide-open, black-and-white Western landscape. Kirk Douglas’ hat shades his eyes. Something is different though; a rumble on the soundtrack, growing louder. The cowboy looks up and sees a trio of jets leading contrails through the sky. The clash between the opening images of David Miller’s 1962 proto-revisionist Western Lonely Are the Brave is almost violent. The archetypal cowboy character we recognize from our movie screens is drawn pertinently as a mythic figure at odds with the world we see through our windows.

In a script masterfully penned by Dalton Trumbo, who had only recently made his official comeback after being blacklisted, Lonely Are the Brave outlines the fraught, political tension between past, present, and myth. At the beginning of the film, Kirk Douglas’ character seems displaced from the past, at odds with the constraints of modernity. As the film develops, though, it becomes clear that while Kirk Douglas may be playing Jack Burns, Jack himself is playing a role – the role of a figure who never really existed. Trumbo and Miller created this mythic figure to reconcile our history with our present, but the ironic truth is that the myth is no longer compatible with either.

Lonely Are the Brave A fiercely independent cowboy gets himself locked up in prison to escape with an old friend. Release Date May 25, 1962 Director David Miller Cast Kirk Douglas , Gena Rowlands , Walter Matthau , Carroll O’Connor Runtime 107 minutes Genres Western , Drama

Kirk Douglas is Out of Place in ‘Lonely Are the Brave’ – and That’s the Point
Simply by placing this character in then-contemporary times, Miller prompts the audience to reconsider their view of the cowboy figure. A grizzled gunslinger who cut his teeth in battle before wandering into town doesn’t read the same way when that battle was the Korean War, a conflict most Americans didn’t understand at the time, and since then would rather forget. In a recognizable modern setting, the realization dawns on us that the romantic image of the drifter cowboy elides the reality of a blue-collar homeless man. Kirk Douglas is no stranger to prescient critiques of power, but he still looks back on Lonely Are the Brave as his finest film. Perhaps this is because it’s also so implicitly self-critical.

After establishing Burns’ alienation from – and refusal to adapt to the modern world, the first third of the film morphs into a charming little prison-break caper. Jack rolls into a small town where an old friend – Michael Kane’s Paul Bondi – has been imprisoned for providing aid to undocumented immigrants. Jack stops by Paul’s house to leave his horse and runs into Paul’s wife, Jerry (Gena Rowlands), who is also an old girlfriend of Jack’s. To anyone watching a Western after 1956, this moment may very well come across as a reference to an implied element of The Searchers (1956), and it places Lonely are the Brave on a continuum beginning with John Ford’s monumental classic. Jack instigates a rousing bar brawl to get himself arrested and is already plotting his escape with Paul by the time he gets thrown into a cell with him and several other good-natured outlaws. It isn’t long before he has Paul and the others helping to file off the bars of their cell and avoid the watchful gaze of the sadistic Deputy Sheriff Gutierrez, who beats Jack just for kicks.

Related Kirk Douglas, Hollywood Legend of ‘Spartacus’ and More, Dies at 103 Douglas is survived by his wife and three children, including actor Michael Douglas.

However, when it’s all done, and their escape route is clear, Paul refuses to leave with Jack. Paul is on his way through a two-year sentence, but jailbreaking carries a minimum of five more years. If Paul runs now, it means he’ll be running for the rest of his life. What’s more, he’ll force his wife, Jerry, and their young daughter into a life of running. He knew what he was risking when he helped those immigrants, and he did it in good conscience. In that same good conscience, he can’t run now. Jack doesn’t fight him. He understands. The Western hero has always practiced a fanciful kind of honor, but here in the real world – the modern world – Jack’s rugged individualism involves nothing more than running from the world that alienates us all and punishes the honorable practices that have a chance at achieving collective good.

There Wouldn’t Have Been ‘Hell or High Water’ Without ‘Lonely Are the Brave’

The scene that follows functions as a fulcrum of the movie’s thematic development, and separates its jailbreak sequence from its man-on-the-run sequence. Up to this point, Jack has been a charming reminder of a romanticized style of rugged individualism that we perceive to be long gone. As he unhooks his horse from Jerry’s porch, though, he seems to acknowledge the problems inherent to this cowboy chivalry. He shares a last kiss with Jerry. He explains that, as much as he’d have liked it to, their romance could never have worked. It’s another scene that echoes a genre-defining classic from the previous decade, this time Shane (1953). Jack explains that he’s a loner, but besides the romanticized resonance of a loner braving an increasingly connected world, Jack acknowledges that that means pushing people away and ultimately putting himself above others. Implicit in this admission is the idea that he is afforded the ability to act out this fantasy he lives out because of his relative privilege. Jerry, for example, is locked out of the romantic prestige Jack imposes on his world because she is a woman who lives in a world of men. She voices discontent about how much of her life depends on men and their codes of honor, and how much she can’t help but care about them anyway. However, as much as Douglas deconstructs the mythic cowboy and shapes him into an avatar of counter-culture, he must leverage privilege to do so. This is a privilege that is not afforded to everybody in America, present or past.

Throughout the film, Miller crosscuts between the proceedings of the plot and a seemingly innocuous trucker making his way across the highway with a shipment of latrines. Meanwhile, Sheriff Johnson, played by the ever-laconic Walter Matthau, chases Jack up a mountain on the way to the Mexican border. Johnson is in a jeep and seems to be somewhat begrudging in his pursuit. He respects Jack, leading his horse up a mountain – or at least he respects the freedom that Jack represents. If this movie exists on a continuum with The Searchers, it exists between that film and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969). Whereas The Wild Bunch created an elegiac ode to the passing of an era through bloody, visceral violence, Lonely Are the Brave imposes its narrative through rhetorical violence, saving its most desperate expression for its very final moments.

On the way up, Jack briefly considers leaving his horse named Whiskey as the horse is slowing him down. After some thought, though, Jack decides to continue with Whiskey. What’s a cowboy without his horse? Tellingly, he decides that the symbol of his freedom is more important than his actual freedom. This sets up the film’s final tragedy. Jack makes it over the mountain and loses his tail. All he has to do is cross a busy highway on Whiskey, and he’ll be home-free. The mythic cowboy, of course, is terminally doomed in the modern world. Whiskey is overwhelmed by the traffic, and the truck driver, struggling to see through rain and night, swerves too late. The image of a horse on a highway beckons comparisons to Taylor Sheridan’s Hell or High Water (2016), and conceives of a similar clash as the one central to that film 54 years later. It is a violent clash between brutal, mechanized modern reality, and simple, fanciful historical mythology. Lonely Are the Brave may not be the most famous Western of the era, but it is a sorely overlooked precursor to the modern Neo-Western. As Whiskey is put out of her misery by a passerby on the blacktop, Jack is wheeled into an ambulance. He’s in shock, because of the depth of his injuries, or because reality finally, violently, caught up with him.

Lonely Are the Brave is available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime Video in the U.S.

WATCH ON AMAZON PRIME