Lonely Are The Brave

Lonely are the Brave (David Miller, 1960) A shot of a sand-blasted scrubby desert landscape—nothing but a clean horizon and no obstacles in sight—begins Lonely are the Brave. The camera heaves from that unbroken horizon to examine the ground and the first indication of interference—a small camp-fire and the toe of a boot belonging to the soul that started it. He's enjoying the last drag of a cigarette before we hear a sound. The man cocks his hat back and squints into the sun. Jets. Military. Three of them, leaving contrails in the sky. A horse snorts. The man looks over at his horse (in the next couple of sentences we'll know its name is "Whiskey") and the man responds, "Time we took off, too."

There's enough time for a last slug of coffee, then he throws the rest on the ground, dousing the fire, and he gets up to saddle his horse. Blanket goes on first. But, as he turns to heft the saddle, the horse reaches over and pulls the blanket off its back. There's a little back and forth of mutual protesting, but eventually the saddle goes on and is cinched. He mounts and the horse rears in protest, but a little useless galloping will burn some of the energy, so man and horse prance around aimlessly for a bit, but they have places to go. Time to take off.

There is some travel time but eventually, they come across a fence. An arbitrary wire thing put on some chart by somebody from the Water and Power Company. But it's in the way. So, he dismounts, takes some clippers out of his saddle-bag and cuts—one, two, three—three violations of an authority he doesn't recognize, nor have use for. And they ride on.

John W.(call him "Jack") Burns (Kirk Douglas) is a cowboy out of time in the 1960's...or just ahead of his time given the era. 

He's a rider on the range. A tumbling tumbleweed. His home is the prairie and his roof is the open sky. He hasn't bought a house, or even bought into the Suburban American Dream. His Dream is older, less expensive, and offers far more freedom. In today's terms, you could call him homeless, but he wouldn't self-identify with that (he'd look at you, amused, with the term "self-identified"—"What's the point of that?") He doesn't want a house—too restrictive. Hell, a fence is too restrictive. 

He rambles...between jobs (he's been herding sheep lately, a bit of a come-down for him), friends, towns. He doesn't use banks. He carries his money. Has no driver's license—he doesn't drive—and no I.D. 

"I don't need a card to tell me who I am. I already know."

But, he has a mission...and a destination. Awhile back, he got 'hold of a newspaper and saw the name of a friend heading for two years in the penitentiary for helping immigrants after they came over the border, giving them food, water, opportunity. He didn't help 'em over, mind you, just helped 'em once they got over. Fences again. Borders.

He and Whiskey cross the freeway into town, past the junkyard with the graveyard on the other side of the path—relics of the past—to pay a call on Jerry Bondi (Gena Rowlands), his pal's wife and it's clear that she and Burns have a past, but how deep a one is never made too clear. But she's another man's wife now and that other man is his friend, so...there's a boundary there, but a mutually agreed upon one. Jerry is frustrated with husband Paul because he's decided to go to the penitentiary than cooperating, choosing prison life over his family. Jack tries to explain that she's an Easterner, not a Westerner, so she puts up with borders as a fact of life, but for him and Jerry that's just not reality, and he implies that she's jealous of "the other woman" whose name is "Do-What-You-Want-And-Hang-'Em-All." She's not amused.

She's glad to see Jack and all, but it's been a long time and why visit now. Jack's a little circumspect, but the implication is he wants to go into town and have a good drunk. Maybe get into some trouble. Maybe get arrested. Maybe see Paul...in prison. "Visiting days are Wednesday," she reminds him. He takes a little bit of his money, gives the rest to her and he skips off into town.

Doesn't take much to get into trouble in a bar there.  First, place he goes there's a belligerent patron (Bill Raisch, a couple years before he played the murderer of Mrs. Richard Kimble on "The Fugitive") who throws a beer stein at him and a fight breaks out. The police come and arrest him, and when he's being booked, he finds out that they'll let him out of the lock-up for 30 days. Not good enough. Jack hauls off and belts a deputy and gets a year in the penitentiary. Good enough.

He eventually gets to Paul (Michael Kane), a writer and activist, and they share old times, but it becomes quite clear to Jack that Paul is going to do his time and not join him in a break-out that Jack has already planned for himself (he's smuggled in hacksaws in his boots—nice search procedures, coppers). Just the thought of being cooped up for a year gives Jack the willies—"my guts get all tied up in knots just thinkin' 'bout it."

But  once they've sawed through one bar of the jail-cell and Jack has shimmied through, Paul tells him why he'll stay: his wife and his son. "I don't want him growing up like we did. I don't want them running away from anything." "Ya grew up on me, didn't ya?" Jack smiles broadly at Paul. "I just changed," he says simply. "That's all." And Jack is gone. He's got 'til sun-up to make it across the mountains and maybe into Mexico. And he stops back at the Bondi's to grab his mare and say good-bye. And leave a gift and a summation of himself and why he can't stay: "'Cause I'm a loner clear down deep to my guts. Know what a loner is? He's a born cripple. He's a cripple because the only person he can live with is himself. It's his life, the way he wants to live. It's all for him. A guy like that, he'd kill a woman like you. Because he couldn't love you, not the way you are loved."

He has one other advantage—the police pursuing him. The local sheriff, Morey Johnson (Walter Matthau) is a good man, but he's a bit ham-strung—his deputy (the immortal William Schallert) is a little slow, and Burns has gone into the mountains, where police cars, stake-outs and search helicopters are at a disadvantage. Even a sadistic deputy (George Kennedy in his first film role) who beat up Burns in prison can't seem to outmaneuver him in the high country, even when Burns is difficulty maneuvering in the terrain with a skittish horse.

The project was the fallow-up project from Spartacus from Douglas' Bryna Productions and the star had fallen in love with the novel "The Brave Cowboy" by ranger and environmental activist Edward Abbey, and went to his Spartacus screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (who had beat the Hollywood black list by receiving an out-in-the-open credit for his Spartacus script) to adapt the novel, taking it out of its 1950's setting and cracking the issue of Paul Bondi's incarceration—substituting his actions in sympathy for Mexican immigrants instead of the novel's draft evasion. Trumbo also did the adaptation one better by planning out Birns trip on a map of the Sandia Mountains. Douglas hired director David Miller, who had a spotty record in Hollywood—directing one Marx Brothers comedy and several thrillers—but an ability to bring films in on budget, something needed with all the location work necessary on this film. 

The film is a classic, and if it has one flaw it might be setting up a parallel, seemingly unimportant story about a truck driver (Carol O'Connor, his film debut) driving "privies" cross-country, which has a tendency to take one abruptly out of Burns' story for one that really doesn't have an pay-off until the climax. It certainly doesn't lend the movie any added suspense to cut away to a truck-driver, when Burns story is compelling, and suspenseful, enough.

It also benefits from one of the breakout scores of composer Jerry Goldsmith, then a contract-writer for Universal pictures, after doing a few B-pictures and some episodic television, including for the series "Thriller" and "The Twilight Zone." Goldsmith was a friend and colleague of composer Alex North, who had composed the music for Spartacus, and it might have been North who passed along Goldsmith's name. What Douglas got was a score of many moods that retained a central theme, but tailored towards introspection and action, with a nice mariachi influence that kept the film rooted to its location (and goal) of the Mexican border. It was the first of Goldsmith's major works, and would be followed quickly by music for John Huston, John Frankenheimer, and Ralph Nelson.

Part of Jerry Goldsmith's classic score for Lonely are the Brave: