Lonely Are the Brave is one of my favorite films for its melancholic rejection of modern society and its stark refusal to compromise. As you note, perhaps the allegory is overly transparent in places, but it succeeds because it strikes a fatalistic note early on and then never swerves from its tragic destiny (as symbolized by that unrelenting truck, implacably trucking down the highway). The filmmakers could have easily allowed Douglas to escape, thus rewarding his effort and offering some hope for us all (or at least those in the audience who share Douglas' iconoclastic/loner ethos). But early on, Lonely Are the Brave had suggested that there was no escape from modernity, and it refuses to reverse its outlook at the last second. There is always a fence or a highway interfering with the lone cowboy's path, and eventually Douglas must pay the price for his iconoclastic idiosyncrasy. By not submitting to society and conforming to the crowd, Douglas must eventually die. He may be able to escape law enforcement, but he cannot escape modernity. None of us can, and that's why Lonely Are the Brave throws such a hard, melancholic punch. This austere, intimate film poignantly engrosses the viewer from the start and takes him or her on a desperate journey, seemingly impossible but not without hope. The chase sequences are genuinely bare and we admire Douglas and his horse for their inventive determination as they refuse to stop, surrender, and submit. But of course, they have been doomed from the beginning and cannot elude their fate. After all, in modern times, there is no empty wilderness to ride off to. Climb the mountain and evade the law, and you will still have a noisy road to cross with trucks speeding down it. Break on through to the other side of the mountain, and you still cannot escape.
I'd bracket Lonely Are the Brave (David Miller, 1962) with The Misfits (John Huston, 1961) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (John Ford, 1962), two of my other favorite films. All three pictures hit theaters in the early 1960s, prior to the Kennedy assassination. The respective filmmakers shot all three in rather archaic black-and-white and played against their stars' triumphantly heroic personas. All three express a longing for older, simpler times, and yet the expressions are poignantly fatalistic instead of sappily sentimental, brutally depressing instead of merrily escapist. All three confronted the melancholy of modernism and the internal angst that it creates for those individuals who cannot glibly fall in line. And at a time when Hollywood was churning out Technicolor epics, these films went in the other direction, hinting at the sort of stripped-down, introspective reflection that would soon come to define the New Hollywood. Did they somehow hint at the looming, tragic fate of the young, irreverent American president and the New Frontier? And was the Douglas figure a metaphor for JFK, dying young with his open-air machismo before he could sink into the dense quagmire of Vietnam? In retrospect, these films did seem to reflect the inexorable darkness lurking between the starry, hopeful twinkles of the early 1960s. And were these movies also latently portentous of the rebellious, socially outraged spirit that would soon define the Vietnam era? It's possible that the desperately trapped, confounded, ill-fated, morose, or otherwise iconoclastic protagonists of directors Sergio Leone, Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols, Sam Peckinpah, George Roy Hill, Dennis Hopper, and Don Siegel had been prefigured by John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, and Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, and most of all, Kirk Douglas in Loney Are the Brave. Indeed, the dour final scene of Lonely Are the Brave foreshadowed the closing roadside deaths witnessed in Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider. Lonely Are the Brave also hinted at the resigned societal alienation that later emerged in The Gradutate and Dirty Harry, along with the tragic outlawry of The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (and Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider). (Indeed, the tense horse chase sequences from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are reminiscent of those from Lonely Are the Brave.) And when you describe the Douglas character as “a man who had no need for society, 9 - 5 work, marriages, mortgages, even a driver's license or photo i.d. ("I know who I am.") ,” you seem to be echoing the words Asian-American militant Frank Chin. In Seattle’s underground newspaper Helix in 1969, Chin admiringly wrote about Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name from the epochal Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns. Said Chin of the Eastwood figure:
He could care less about progress, the course of civilization, work, money, most women, home, settling down, down payments on a late-model horse, clothes. ... His role says, "I am nobody, and you better not f#ck with me." Society takes this as a challenge and sets out to absorb or kill him.
[Page 321 of J. Hoberman, The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of the Sixties (New York: The New Press, 2003).]
Could not Chin have also been describing Douglas in Lonely Are the Brave, albeit in kinder, gentler form, not nihilistic but no less unmitigated? And as a result, we can see Lonely Are the Brave as a precipitous film, one that spoke to the intolerable angst created by modernity, an anxiety that would soon express itself in militant belligerence. Douglas’ iconoclasm was polite here, but it was that loner’s irreverence that counted and hinted at the impolite iconoclasm to come.
Of course, none of these connections should be made too literally. Lonely Are the Brave was not a box office hit, and it may not have directly influenced any of these films and characters. But along with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence and The Misfits, it did seem to represent an anachronistic epiphany, a forewarning of modernism’s fatalism and a hint at the unsettled confusion to come. Indeed, pretty soon, Lonely Are the Brave’s polite iconoclasm would give way to the edgier and decidedly more violent variety. And finally, Lonely Are the Brave seemed to set the template for the "modern Western," films such as Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner, Sydney Pollack’s The Electric Horseman, and Eastwood’s Bronco Billy, movies that also told tales of cowboys who struggled to live in another era, out of step with the times. The Electric Horseman, in particular, owes a major debt to David Miller’s masterpiece, showing just how portentous his little movie turned out to be.
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ecarle
18 years ago
I enjoy reading your stuff. I hope others do, too (its one of many ways to use the imdb threads.)
"Lonely Are the Brave" was not a hit on release (though my family saw it, and I have vague memories of that), but its reputation travelled rather rapidly, I think. I think it is very possible that it DID influence a lot of those movies to come after it. It was screened at colleges a lot, I know, and I think Pauline Kael listed it as one "the first American art films to follow the European model."
"The Electric Horseman" owes it a great debt. Tougher movies like the original "First Blood" (the original Rambo movie) and "Death Hunt" are somewhat like it, but more interested in violent action.
It would certainly seem to have a lot in common with "The Misfits" as both films have that "modern Western" feeling. Equally important: both films offered a view of that part of America where most of America DOESN'T live -- the "wide open spaces" of the American West circa the early sixties. Small towns and small cities like Reno are right on the edge of nothing, and the heroes in these films like it there. They are independent people, but -- like John W. Burns -- they are kind of damaged people, too.
There is a mystical quality to several American films made in the early sixties right before JFK's assassination, I think, in that they seem to be pointing directly TO it, and the end of innocence in this country.
Way far away from these Westerns is one of my other favorite movies from this period -- Hitchcock's "Psycho," (1960) which actually has some things in common with "Lonely Are the Brave": black-and-white production values and art direction from Universal Studios on the technical end, and something thematic at the other: "Psycho," too, begins in a small desert city on the edge of nothingness: Phoenix, Arizona, with some "modern Westerners" who have found the Far West of America to be the End of the World. (Even Hitchcock himself wears a cowboy hat in this movie.) Janet Leigh's Marion Crane is a doomed character who "gets killed early" just as JFK would several years later. But Kirk Douglas in "Lonely Are the Brave" and John Wayne in "Liberty Valance" are doomed too, just in other ways.
It's as if a number of artists who peaked in the fifties (Douglas, Huston, Gable, Monroe, Hitchcock) had a sense that the sixties were going to be different somehow, that change was in the air. With the older set -- Hitchocck and John Ford especially -- they probably felt the onset of the end physically (their health declined) and felt like transferring the feeling to movies.
I read an interview recently with 70's director Peter Bogdanovich in which he suggested that the American studio system conclusively died in 1962 (he pinpointed the death to the '62 abolishment by Warners of all Bugs Bunny-related cartoon production), followed by a fallow period to about 1967, when the "Young Turks" finally started to take over ("Bonnie and Clyde," "The Graduate" and Clint kick in around then.)
In that light, "Lonely Are the Brave" ends up being in that vital year of "62, as EITHER (a) the end of one era (Kirk Douglas' era) or (b) the beginning of another era (the New Hollywood.)
Anyway you cut it, "Lonely Are the Brave" is a great, moving, influential movie.
P.S. It's theatrical run may have been short, but "Lonely Are the Brave" did make the rounds of American network television in the mid-sixties, where many folks caught up with it and its legend grew in this country. Europe had liked it for years.
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joekiddlouischama
18 years ago
You connect Psycho to the scene in a shrewd and appropriate way. I had been thinking about that film as another Hollywood movie from the early 1960s that had been rather archaically shot in black-and-white, but the psychological and horror dimensions seemed to remove it from the realm of this discussion. But you're correct in citing its location as a means of connecting it to The Misfits and Lonely Are the Brave. All three films are set in the desultory emptiness of the modern American West, a sort of desert vacuity through which lonely, fatalistic figures (including Marion in Psycho) drift. On the eve of JFK's assassination, these films all project a sense of America being on the edge of the void.
The citation of 1962 as a watershed of some sort seems appropriate, too. George Lucas, for example, set American Graffiti in 1962, citing that date as the year when he really noticed the beginning of a shift in the culture. It was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Dr. No, and the sixties as we've come to remember them were really starting to begin. Certainly, it would take about five years for the turnover in popular culture to fully take effect, but the starting point does seem to have begun in 1962. The year also seemed to mark the end of a cinematic era, with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence probably serving as the last great Western in American theaters until the Leone films reached the U.S. five years later (although 1966's Duel at Diablo is a terrific early sign of the spaghetti influence on the American Western). Liberty Valence was perhaps the final "classic" among truly traditional Westerns. Afterwards, the genre seemed to split in two, between revisionism (and post-revisionism) on the one hand and a sort of genial, petered-out traditionalism on the other.
Another element that makes Lonely Are the Brave so special is its lack of a primary villain (the same is true for The Misfits). Douglas encounters a couple of antagonists early on, but overall, there is no singular villain who serves as the locus for all the troubles. The problem is existence and modern society themselves, and that's the problem that most of us encounter in our daily lives. And worst of all, as in this film, it's not something that can really be defeated. Matthau's portrayal of a lawman dutifully but almost reluctantly pursuing the outlaw, with no passion for blood, also seemed to set a trend, influencing films such as Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Eastwood's A Perfect World. There'a sense of irony and poignancy to the setup, one that speaks to the gray ambiguities of life.
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joekiddlouischama
18 years ago
And I guess that it shouldn't be surprising that Lonely Are the Brave found a more appreciative audience in Europe (and on the American college circuit), because it's existential in its essence and that philosophical outlook always seemed to grab a stronger hold in war-torn Europe. It's also true that even films that aren't hits with the American public can still influence many members of the American filmmaking community. For example, the Leone Westerns didn't reach American theaters until 1967, but already by 1966, American Westerns such as Duel at Diablo and The Appaloosa were reflecting their influence. Sidney Poitier and Marlon Brando even seemed to be imitating Eastwood in places; Brando opens the latter film sporting a beard and poncho, almost as if he was "playing" Eastwood.
Another film that I broadly connect to Lonely Are the Brave (and The Misfits) is 3:10 to Yuma, a Western from 1957. Like Lonely Are the Brave, it sympathetically follows the plight of an outlaw on the run (Glenn Ford), features beautiful, silver-toned desert cinematography, and is hauntingly forlorn and poetic in tone.
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joekiddlouischama
18 years ago
Here's another sign of the pivotal, in-flux nature of 1962: it featured the release of Ride the High Country. The autumnal Western represented future revisionist Sam Peckinpah's directorial debut in features, and yet this film represented his most traditional work by far, starring a couple of traditional Western icons, Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea. Ride the High Country, like 1962 itself, seemed to have one arrow pointing towards the past and another pointing towards the future.
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Doc-McCoy
18 years ago
Although "Lonely are the Brave" doesn't have a true villain, in a small role George Kennedy comes closest, since he hates Burns and has no real reason to hate him (at least that I can recall).
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joekiddlouischama
18 years ago
Yeah, Lonely Are the Braves certainly features a couple of early antagonists, including Kennedy in the thuggish type of role in which he specialized. But in a structural, overarching sense, Douglas' main adversary is modernity.
By the way, I just looked up Lonely Are the Brave in J. Hoberman's The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of the Sixties (2003), and he too brackets that film along with The Misfits, Hud, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, and Ride the High Country as early sixties "self-conscious post-Westerns" and "melancholy twilight Westerns" whose protagonists were "endangered species" and whose tones were rather "masochistic." Writes Hoberman on pages 104-5:
The New Frontier's characteristic expressions included a cluster of self-conscious post-Westerns, contemporary in setting and shot like art films in black and white, as well as the first melancholy "twilight" Westerns (suffused with unfulfilled hopes and unfulfilled threats). The post-Westners were ambivalent unto neurosis and conceived by liberals, some just returned to Hollywood: The Misfits (1961), was directed by self-exiled John Huston from HUAC-harassed Arthur Miller's screenplay; Lonely Are the Brave (1962) was produced by star Kirk Douglas and written by Dalton Trumbo; Hud (1963) was directed by gray-listed Martin Ritt. All featured estranged—even alienated—protagonists hung up on the idea of cowboy integrity that men like Wayne and Barry Goldwater projected as birthright.
Characterized by confused individualism and clucking dismay over an America lost to commercialization, the post- and twilight Westerns articulated what G.W. McClintock would deplore as disgraceful self-pity. The wranglers in the prolonged drunken binge that is The Misfits are reduced to killing mustangs for dog food, while the dim-witted cowboy hero of Lonely Are the Brave has himself jailed in order to break out a buddy imprisoned for aiding Mexican illegals. The cowboy escapes alone to be run over on a rain-slicked highway by a truck carrying a load of toilet seats. "Natural man going down in defeat under the continual brutal assault of the industrial-capitalistic-governmental juggernaut," jeered Brandan Gill in the New Yorker.
Again, compare that melancholic, anti-civilization comment to Asian-American militant Frank Chin's 1969 writing about the Sergio Leone Westerns (Hoberman 321):
According to Chin, indigenous Third World revolutionaries like the Black Panthers and the (American) Red Guards were "often at the drive-in, whooping it up with Sergio Leone." These abstract, gritty Westerns provided would-be urban guerillas with spiritual armament "against the monstrous brutality of the civilization that hates men, hates the land, hates America the Country and America the Dream."
And so once again, Lonely Are The Braves emerges as a portentous film, of its time and yet ahead of its time, too. Indeed, Hoberman notes that its highway ending ironically prefigures the climax of the epic How the West Was Won (1963), which concludes with "the thrilling vista of bulldozed construction sites and traffic-clogged LA freeways," representing "a bizarre echo of the downbeat Lonely Are the Brave closer." Of course, the climax for How the West Was Won is supposed to be triumphant, signifying the victory of civilization over the wilderness, but as British critic Philip French observed at the time, "A black humorist could scarcely have come up with a bleaker, more satirical ending." And finally, writes Hoberman, this motif of the expansive, coldly industrial highway carried an ominous resonance: "A new superhighway being built by American advisers through the primeval jungle of far-off Indochina" (107).
Again, could Douglas have effectively represented JFK, going down on the Western road before it could take him across the Pacific to Vietnam? The socio-political-cultural resonance of Lonely Are the Brave is astounding.
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ecarle
18 years ago
The socio-political-cultural resonance of Lonely Are the Brave is astounding.
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And yet, this baby still isn't on DVD. Several strikes against it, I guess: black-and-white, from the early sixties...Western.
I guess we should start voting. You'd think Kirk and Michael Douglas would have some clout to get it on DVD, too.
P.S. One very small side issue that has always intrigued me about "Lonely Are the Brave":
George Kennedy is presented as a "small scale villain" in "Lonely Are the Brave." He's the jail house guard who bullies first Douglas' friend ("Hey, college boy," he sneers at him) and then Douglas himself, with a beating.
In the films's second half, Kennedy is one of WALTER MATTHAU'S team, hunting Douglas over the mountain. Matthau actually directs Kennedy as to where he should go.
Given how sympathetically Matthau is presented, it is of some bitter irony that he is, nonetheless, the boss of Kennedy's character, and thus an "endorser" to some extent of Kennedy's brutish ways.
Matthau is playing a local sheriff, probably elected, and obviously stuck with a team of men who are not the best: a nincompoop (William Schallert), a guy who is first seen lying on a couch reading a magazine, a couple of other slackers who sit around drinking Cokes -- and Kennedy.
One senses the extent to which Matthau himself feels as trapped by the system as the man he is hunting. He's stuck with these guys, and the brutal Kennedy is probably -- to a local sheriff -- a necessary agent of power over "the criminals".
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Doc-McCoy
18 years ago
Kirk Douglas has said that this is his favorite of all the films he's made - as you say, he and Michael should have the clout to get it released on DVD.
I think Matthau may not know about Kennedy thuggish behavior, or if he does is resigned tto the fact there's not much he can do about it. Kennedy's character seems like the type to push people around when he can get away with it, but backs off when confronted - in short, the stereotypical schoolyard bully. He also would be an a$$-kisser to the boss.
It's been a few years since I've seen this film, but I have it somewhere on VHS and should dust it off again.
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wtl471629
17 years ago
All the performances are great and George Kennedy certainly showed why he was to be a big star in later years.
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ecarle
17 years ago
Bump.
In honor of its showing on Turner Classic Movies (right after "Ace in the Hole"!) on "Kirk Douglas Day" August 26, 2007.
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ecarle
18 years ago
Good assessment of the Matthau-Kennedy relationship! Makes sense.
btw, "Lonely Are the Brave" was made at Universal Pictures in 1962, and led to Matthau and Kennedy being cast together in two more Universal films:
"Charade" (1963), supporting Grant and Hepburn
"Mirage" (1965) supporting Gregory Peck.
Both of those films are very good 60's thrillers, with more great work from Matthau and Kennedy. In fact, these guys were so good that Matthau would win the 1966 Best Supporting Actor Oscar (for "The Fortune Cookie") and Kennedy would win the 1967 Best Supporting Actor Oscar the next year (for "Cool Hand Luke.")
So Kirk Douglas had solid support in "Lonely Are the Brave" -- and that movie DID help launch two more fine acting careers. Stanley Donen, director of "Charade," said he cast Matthau in "Charade" specifically because he saw him in "Lonely Are the Brave."
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joekiddlouischama
18 years ago
I was reading through some old interviews, and Clint Eastwood twice mentioned Lonely Are the Brave, both times unsolicited. For a film that was not a box office hit, it definitely seemed to carry a strong influence in the filmmaking community.
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efs2
17 years ago
joekiddlouischama wrote:
Here's another sign of the pivotal, in-flux nature of 1962: it marked the release of Ride the High Country. The autumnal Western marked future revisionist Sam Peckinpah's directorial debut in features, and yet this film represented his most traditional work by far, starring a couple of traditional Western icons, Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea. Ride the High Country, like 1962 itself, seemed to have one arrow pointing towards the past and another pointing towards the future.
Interesting.
And to add to the theory,
Ride the High Country was Scott's last movie. In contrast, although of considerably less significance, it was Mariette Hartley's first.
I would kill everyone in this room for one drop of sweet beer.
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