NOTES ON A WESTERN MOVIE
by Dan Stumpf:

   
   This is not a review of

LONELY ARE THE BRAVE. Universal, 1962. Kirk Douglas, Gena Rowlands, Walter Matthau, Michael Kane, Carroll O’Connor, William Schallert, and George Kennedy. Screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, from the novel The Brave Cowboy by Edward Abbey. Directed by David Miller.

   This is not a review, because I haven’t seen Lonely Are the Brave in its entirety. Nor do I intend to. No, this is more of a reminiscence and reflection on what I HAVE seen of it, and not to be taken for a serious evaluation.

    Lonely aired on the 9 PM Saturday night movie back in 1972. I remember the approximate date, because I was working 3rd shift that night and had to leave for work at 10 PM. I wasn’t particularly keen on watching it, because I knew how it ended –

         (PARENTHETICAL NOTE AND !!!WARNING!!

   Indeed, every reviewer in the Free World seems to have felt duty-bound to reveal the ending of the film, and if I mention it here, well you got your !!!WARNING!!! )

   –and I had no taste for the pre-fab defeatism of a story like that. But this was in the days of very limited choices, before cable, VCRs, and all that, so I settled in to watch the first half of Lonely Are the Brave.

   And it wasn’t half bad! Kirk Douglas stars as a shiftless cowboy who wanders in to visit his old buddy (Michael Kane) and learns from his wife (Gena Rowlands) he’s in jail for helping out some migrant workers. There’s real power in this scene, what is commonly and conveniently called Chemistry between the actors as they convey longing, frustration, and rueful passion between them. So Kirk, being soft of heart and head, decides to spring his old buddy from jail.

   A terrific (and quite brutal) bar fight lands him in the pokey with his friend and a file to cut away the window bars (No, I didn’t believe it either!) Come to think of it, Kirk gets three nasty thumpings in this movie, and ends up with nothing worse than a few scratches and makeup-man-made bruises, but I digress; things don’t go as planned because his childhood buddy is too mature for anything as dumb as a jail-break.

   Which leaves Kirk at loose ends and looking kind of childish. Also, he should get out of town pretty quick. But he makes a final stop to see Gena, reflects thoughtfully on old times, his inability to grow up with them, and the love that might have been… Then saddles up his horse and rides off into the sunrise, down the way to Mexico. At which point I had to buckle on my gunbelt and head into Night Shift.

   But the more I thought about Lonely, the more I liked it right there, ending with that image of the sadder-but-wiser hero on his way to some mythical fade-out always just beyond the end credits.

   And so I have been content to leave it that way. I know the ending of Lonely Are the Brave, and it just doesn’t interest me.

   But I highly recommend that first half!