When I attended a conversation with Kirk Douglas a couple of years ago he mentioned that his personal favorite among all of the films he’d done was Lonely Are the Brave. I wasn’t familiar with that title, but soon learned that there had not yet been a DVD release either in R1 or the UK. (An edition in Spain did pop up around this time, but shipping costs from most European retailers outside of the UK are often enormously pricey from my experience.) It was another several months before TCM, truly the most reliable (and legal) source for finding movies not on DVD, put Lonely Are the Brave on the schedule and I was finally able to see it. Good, solid picture. A bit strange, but in a good way. The more I saw the deeper and more uncertain my feelings became for Douglas’ character.

The film, done for Universal in 1962, tells the story of John W. Burns, a cowboy in mid-twentieth century New Mexico. Trails and horses have been ushered aside in favor of roads and automobiles, but Burns chooses to live his own way. After seeing the movie a couple of times, I realized that this main idea easily could have been executed with a total lack of finesse. We’re potentially dealing with a film in which the viewer would be expected to see either how wrong the main character is or how right his ideas are, but never allowing for the dimensions of each to be fully explored. Where I think Lonely Are the Brave really earns its place among the best westerns of the early sixties and as an essential in the genre as a whole is in just how committed the film is to pulling away from Burns a little. Douglas clearly understands his character and embodies those ideas in his performance, but the roles played by Gena Rowlands and Walter Matthau and the complicated situations we see make things far more grey. It’s difficult to come up with the answers in terms of what should be seen as correct.

The great news now is that Universal, with apparent prodding from Steven Spielberg, released Lonely Are the Brave on R1 DVD earlier this month in a solid and affordable edition. I’ve just reviewed it for DVD Times. While the source novel was called The Brave Cowboy, Douglas, making this the first film for his Joel Productions, apparently wanted the title to be The Last Cowboy. Both titles are okay, but I’m a little partial to what Douglas wanted. I don’t know if Burns is necessarily brave in his actions aside from just the decision to do things his own way, and that’s a potentially dangerous way to define the word. A few lines he says to Rowlands’ character emphasize the lonely aspect, calling himself a loner and confiding that that also makes him a born cripple. How many other westerns have a hero who’d call himself a born cripple?