West by Southwest Ernie Bulow

from September 2019 Gallup Journey Magazine

The 101 to Car Insurance Angela Biava

LONELY ARE THE BRAVE

KIRK DOUGLAS’ FAVORITE FILM ROLE

In 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

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,

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 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. JACK BURNS IS FORCED INTO A ONE-ARMED FIGHT IN A BAR

Ernie Bulow

West by Southwest

by Ernie Bulow

WALTER MATTHAU

marking the territory. And the deputy drives him crazy because he always repeats the question, and then says, “Right.”

Sheriff Morey Johnson (Matthau) is addicted to chewing gum. While they watch the cowboy scaling the mountain, he says to his deputy, “You’d think we were chasing a ghost, an invisible horse and an invisible cowboy. Harry, throw me that canteen. I haven’t got enough spit left to wet a stick of gum.”

While Burns is in jail, he makes an enemy of a deputy named Gutierrez. George Kennedy was superb in Cool Hand Luke as Newman’s buddy, but this go-round he plays a sadistic lawman who is out for revenge. Kennedy makes a great bad guy. I mean, he really looks and acts like a sociopath.

In the meantime, Jack Burns has retrieved his horse and headed up the face of the Sandia’s. There is no movie set hokum here. The escape route is right up through the rocks. Now and then there is a look at tiny Albuquerque, and there are no buildings up along the river at all.

Matthau and his nutty deputy drive up to the base of the trail. The army wants to get in the act, so they talk the sheriff into help from a helicopter. When Burns shoots the copter down, the General is less than happy. Bill Bixby is the uncredited helicopter pilot. Bixby appeared in a couple of sitcoms, but is better known for The Hulk.

All the while, we keep getting shots of an eighteen-wheeler full of toilets going down old Route 66. The truck driver is Carol O’Connor, the star of All in the Family years later. As the hours drag on, he is getting more and more tired and the load of potties virtually becomes a character as it rolls toward Duke City. Obviously, it is a symbol of something. A portent. Clearly Burns thinks that is where the whole country is headed. Gutierrez and some other lawmen have gone up to the rim to cut the cowboy off if he makes it that far. Kennedy goes off on his own because he clearly wants revenge. So, the film jumps from the sheriff, to Gutierrez, to the semi, and back to Burns. The cowboy knows that the deputy is probably coming down after him, so he sets a trap of his own.

He ties the skittish pony to a tree and circles around. Just as Gutierrez thinks he’s got the cowboy in his sites, he feels the barrel of a thirtythirty on his cheek. For all his talk, Burns can’t kill the man, so he knocks him out and continues up the trail. When they crest the mountain, Gutierrez gets off a lucky shot from below.

All the same it appears he has made his break. Then it starts to rain, so the toilets, Burns, and Whiskey are on a collision course.

I haven’t got enough spit left to wet a stick of gum.

Ed was hired as a consultant on the film. I think he told me once they gave him a thousand dollars. He didn’t make anything like what books turned into films do these days.

While some of my writer friends have not done very well with the adaptations of their books to movies, I think Lonely Are The Brave is a masterpiece, even if not perfectly faithful to the novel.

- ernie@buffalomedicine.com

GEORGE KENNEDY

Mountain Region

McKinley and Apache Counties

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