In a 7.27.12 N.Y. Times essay, director Alex Cox (Repo Man) went to bat for Kirk Douglas and Dalton Trumbo‘s Lonely Are The Brave (’62).
“It’s hard to imagine a film as radical or pessimistic [as this one] being made today,” he wrote. “Douglas’s lead character Jack Burns refuses to carry ID or listen to reason. He disrespects the power company by cutting its barbed-wire fences; the county jail, by breaking out; the sheriff, whose manhunt he eludes; the military-industrial complex, whose helicopter he shoots down; and us, the viewers, who — when the lights go up or the DVD ends — return to a life played mainly by the rules.
“Remarkably for a low-budget western, Lonely Are the Brave poses uneasy questions about the idea, and value, of heroism,” Cox concluded.
All my life I’ve been telling people that Lonely Are The Brave is one of Douglas’s finest films, and that it certainly contains one of his best performances. I told Douglas this when I interviewed him 41 years ago in Laredo, Texas, and he agreed without hesitation. I actually first said this to him a month or so earlier during a press meet-and=greet at Elaine’s, which Bobby Zarem had arranged.
I respect Lonely Are The Brave for what it does right. I love the plainness and simplicity of it. I love Walter Matthau‘s performance as the sheriff who gets what Jack Burns (or the Burns metaphor) is basically about, and who sympathizes with him. I love widescreen black-and-white photography by Philip Lathrop (Experiment in Terror, Days of Wine and Roses, Point Blank). And early on there’s a very well-handled scene between Burns and an ex-girlfriend, played by Gena Rowlands.
But Burns is too much for me these days. He’s such a romantic fool, a stubborn nine year-old, a middle-aged guy who never thinks farther than the next job, the next pretty girl in a bar, the next shot of rye, the well-being of his horse. He’s basically just swaggering around and saying “fuck it…I’m just not one of those guys who thinks practically about anything…fact is, I’m a romantic construct…a metaphor for the last sentimental cowboy battling the encroachments of civilization.”
I still like Lonely Are The Brave, mind. But not as much as I used to.