Not only one of the great "death of the West" pictures, Lonely Are the Brave is by many accounts one of the best westerns ever made. Its star, Kirk Douglas, rates it as his favorite film he's worked on. It broke the blacklist with Dalton Trumbo's full credit for writing. Aside from a VHS that is long out of print and the occasional Turner Classic Movies airing, it's been impossible to find for a long time.
Douglas plays Jack Burns, a man with no government-issued ID or car. All Jack has is the shirt on his back, a horse, and the bare necessities. Jack's friend Paul has been put in prison. Paul's wife Jerry is played by Gena Rowlands, best known by my generation as "that old lady in The Notebook." This was only Rowlands' third film after doing a great deal of TV work.
Jerry and Jack have some unrequited chemistry that becomes immediately apparent in her first moments on-screen. Walter Matthau appears later on as the sheriff tasked with tracking Jack down. A year later, he'd make Charade with Stanley Donen. Bill Bixby, William Schallert, George Kennedy, and Carroll O'Connor appear in "that guy" parts. I feel it important to note that Schallert is still acting at the age of 87 (he had a birthday on the 6th of July), next appearing in Green Lantern: First Flight. According to a longstanding quote, he never intends to retire. Everyone's favorite supporting performance is that of Whiskey, Jack's horse. She's one of the best movie horses I've ever seen.
Douglas wanted to call the picture The Last Cowboy, closer to the title of the book upon which it was based ("Brave Cowboy"). As much as I instantly like that title, I love the poetry of the one the studio forced on it against his protest. The biggest reason that red-till-they're-dead conservatives identify so strongly with the cowboy archetype is that, as Douglas puts it in the included featurette, it's become very "difficult to be an individual."
That's something everyone out there feels to some degree, thanks to all the homogenization that's gone on over the last number of decades. Whether it's clothes, dwellings, or food, it all seems formed out of the same molds no matter where you look. Individualism is on a sharp decline, and a lot of it comes from the proliferation of little screens we can all console ourselves with any time, all the time.
Whether it's obsessing over how many friends we have on social networks or finding ways to forget about all the debt we have, there's always some flimsy "escape" to be had. I wonder if all the avenues for "freedom of choice" we see aren't actually fencing us in without our realizing it. I know so many people not only addicted to their internet connection, but their smartphones and media players as well. I've become convinced that someone could make a "disaster" movie where all these things stop working and the United States falls under the crushing weight of a national anxiety attack.
The two extras are more than I ever expected I'd see on this release. Lonely Are The Brave: A Tribute [19:13] features new interview footage with Kirk Douglas, his son Michael, Gena Rowlands, and Steven Spielberg. It may mark me as a sap, but I've felt for a while now that it would be a terrible injustice to allow the movie to go without a DVD release before Kirk Douglas leaves us. Spielberg's presence as anything other than a fan is only explained toward the end when he reveals his role in getting the DVD out. Rowlands refers to her director son as "Nicky," which made me chuckle. The Music of Lonely Are The Brave [9:46] examines the scoring done by Jerry Goldsmith, and how his work and ingenuity here is reflected throughout his later work. I most enjoyed getting to hear clips of unused cues, the buried treasure of great composers.
The movie is $15 and worth three times that. Order it at Amazon here and a fraction of a dollar goes toward keeping this column going.