6/27/2023 0 Comments Lonely are the braveDouglas himself seems to agree since he described his character in Lonely Are the Brave as pure and good. Douglas's character throughout is a portrayed as a tough, strong willed individual, not one that treats others brutally out of sadistic glee. The horse is shot and Douglas goes to the hospital. Douglas is on the verge of getting away when he and his horse are injured. Law enforcement proceeds to chase after Douglas. Douglas breaks out of jail, and rides off into the hills on his horse. Douglas gets himself thrown into jail on purpose so he can break his friend's husband out of jail. He finds out that her husband is in jail for giving aid to illegal Mexican immigrants. The basic plot line as I recall was Douglas goes to visit a friend. Some of those elements were present (shootouts) in Lonely Are the Brave, but they were greatly subdued in comparison. I haven't seen the movie for years, but based on my recollection I don't understand why this movie would be considered "brutal" and "sadistic." Were people reacting to the horse being shot at the end, or something else? This seems especially strange since most Westerns generally involved killing scores of Native Americans and/or big shootouts. In his memoir Conversations with Kennedy, Ben Bradlee wrote, "Jackie read off the list of what was available, and the President selected the one we had all unanimously voted against, a brutal, sadistic little Western called Lonely Are the Brave." Kennedy watched the movie in the White House in November 1962. I was surprised to see this quote on it's Wikipedia page (emphasis mine): And Kirk Douglas' unrecognized masterpiece, "Lonely Are the Brave," was in the same class.I personally really love the Kirk Douglas movie Lonely Are the Brave. So was "Hud," although in a modern setting. " Shane" was a cowboy movie of this type. These are the kind of people, we feel, who must really have inhabited the West: common, direct, painfully shy in social situations and very honest. The admirable thing about the movie is its devotion to real life. They never do make love, and it takes them most of the movie to work up enough momentum to kiss the effect is a great deal more fascinating (and erotic) than Jane Fonda fans might believe. Love, in many recent movies, has become as mechanical as marriage used to be.īut in "Will Penny," the man and woman are quite properly shy about each other, even though the situation is complicated when they are snowbound in a remote cabin with Miss Hackett's young son. It is never quite convincing when two lovers fall into each other's arms three minutes after being introduced, and it isn't very erotic either. Lonely are the Brave opens as a standard Western with a cowboy sleeping on the ground near his horse, but then we hear jet engines and we know this isnt the Old West, but a contemporary Western. Its title character, played by Charlton Heston, is a man in his mid-40s who has been away from society so long he hardly knows how to react when he is treated as a civilized being.Īnd its love story, involving Heston and Joan Hackett, is one of the most satisfying I can remember. Its heroes are not very handsome or glamorous. "Will Penny" occupies this land of "real" cowboys most convincingly. Dodge City was probably as much a polyglot collection of recent immigrants as the Lower East Side of New York. Another fact - one that has gone unrecognized in every Western I can remember - was that most of the cowboys were new arrivals in America, and spoke with a variety of European accents. Most of the people in the West were cowboys, and most of their time was spent in the company of cows. What we forget is that fairly few people in the old West were engaged in striding down Main Street at high noon or shooting it out with Wyatt Earp.
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