LONELY ARE THE BRAVE I
KIRK DOUGLAS’ FAVORITE FILM ROLE
n 1951, Kirk Douglas made the movie Ace in the Hole filmed west of Gallup at the state line. It was one of his best. In 1962, fresh off his success in Spartacus, Kirk Douglas starred in what he calls “my favorite movie.” Lonely Are The Brave was based on the novel Brave Cowboy by Edward Abbey. When I asked Ed about the film, he wasn’t whole-heartedly happy with it, but it worked off a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo had been caught up in the “Commie” nonsense in the early fifties and spent some jail time for contempt of court. He was blackballed as one of the “Hollywood Ten” because he refused to testify in front of Joe McCarthy’s kangaroo court. Kirk Douglas managed to get him screen credit for Spartacus and he wanted him to do the screenplay for the Cowboy film. Trumbo wanted to call it The Last Cowboy. I would have been happy with Brave Cowboy, myself.
KIRK DOUGLAS WITH HIS HORSE -WHISKEY
FENCE CUTTING
The movie opens with Kirk Douglas by a campfire. It quickly becomes clear that he is on the west mesa, above Albuquerque. There is an early shot with the “volcanoes” in the background. The audience doesn’t immediately know it, but the filly he calls, appropriately, Whiskey, is going to be a problem. When Kirk tries to saddle her, she keeps pulling off the blanket every time he picks up the saddle. Almost immediately he rides up on a barbed wire
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fence. Cowboys used to pull some post staples, lead their horse across, and then staple the wires back to the posts. This cowboy just cuts them. He says a cowboy has to hate fences… “And the more fences there are, the more he hates them.” When the camera turns to the east, the Sandia Mountains come into sight, and what looks like a small town sitting at the base of the mountains. Albuquerque at the time had a population of 200,000 but in the distance shots it looks smaller. Abbey had been a long-time resident of Duke City, as it is called in the film.
The cowboy is looking to bust an old friend out of jail. Paul Bondi is facing two years in prison—nailed for helping illegal immigrants. How familiar that rings sixty years later. He leaves his horse with his buddy’s wife, played by Gina Rowlands. They were obviously an item sometime in the past. A man with one arm picks a fight with Jack Burns (Douglas) in a local bar. The one-armed actor later got a recurring role in the television series The Fugitive. When Burns isn’t quite getting the worst of the scuffle, the other patrons join in. When the cops show up, it is Burns who is taken to jail. When they decide to let him go, he punches a cop and they throw him in. No surprise, he has no identification. “I know who I am,” he tells the cops. All that trouble and his friend Paul refuses to make a break for it. The loneliness in the movie title is what a true loner can expect. Burns cuts the bars and he and two Navajos escape. The holding cell is identical to the one that used to be in the old courthouse in Gallup. Just one big cage. Walter Matthau is wonderful as the sheriff who is really rooting for the cowboy to escape. There are two ongoing gags. Every day the sheriff watches a dog make his daily rounds,
JACK BURNS IS FORCED INTO A ONE-ARMED FIGHT IN A BAR
