With the deck stacked against him, can a determined Jack evade the encroaching net and vanquish the modern world? That's a tall task for one man and one horse, but like the name of so many saloons across the Old West, this is Jack's last chance and he's going to give it his all. Yet unlike the western showdowns of yore, this one features helicopters, jeeps, and radio communication. It's Jack and Whiskey versus a police posse led by Sheriff Morley Johnson (Walter Matthau) and his sadistic deputy Gutierrez (George Kennedy). Jack respects Paul's decision, but decides to escape anyway, believing if he and Whiskey can just make it over the Sandia Mountains, he'll have a straight shot to Mexico, where he can live his life unbound and on his own primitive terms.Īnd so begins an arduous journey fraught with danger. Now a husband and father, Paul embraces his responsibilities, rues his prior mistakes, and vows to serve out his sentence and return to his family. After a bruising barroom brawl with a belligerent one-armed local (Bill Raisch, who would later play the famed One-Armed Man on The Fugitive TV series), Jack gets his wish, but finds Paul is no longer the free-spirited, rebellious man he once knew. Jack aims to bust Paul out of the brink, but to engineer a jailbreak he has to get himself arrested first. 'Either you go by the rules or you lose,' she tells him. Sparks still fly between Jack and Jerry, but she's frustrated by his dogged independence, lingering immaturity, and unwillingness to adapt to modern society. His mantra? 'Do what you want to do and to hell with everybody else.' So far, that's worked for Jack, but the walls begin to close in on him when he rides into Albuquerque to look up his old flame Jerry (Gena Rowlands), whose husband Paul Bondi (Michael Kane), Jack's dearest friend, recently landed in prison for shielding and aiding a group of illegal Mexican immigrants. 'Don't Fence Me In' would be a fitting theme song for Jack, a drifter and loner who flies by the seat of his pants on the saddle of his beloved horse Whiskey. A literate script by Dalton Trumbo, sincere performances from a top-notch cast, stunning location photography, and potent themes all combine to produce a stirring motion picture that touches our hearts and sticks to our ribs. Director David Miller's thoughtful, moving, and exciting drama beautifully captures a pivotal time and place and the myriad emotions ripping apart Jack Burns (Kirk Douglas) as he clings to a credo that no longer applies and a world that no longer exists. No film depicts the encroachment of contemporary life on a stubborn, starry-eyed cowboy and the shifting attitudes shaping America's modern West better than Lonely Are the Brave.

What happens, though, when we reach the end of that frontier and progress begins to crowd out the iconic cowboy and render him a relic of a bygone era? What happens when the wide-open spaces shrink and an automobile replaces a horse as man's vehicle of choice? The rugged cowboy stands as a symbol of American freedom and the possibilities that await intrepid explorers courageous enough to venture into the unknown and push the frontier's boundaries.

Westerns remain one of the most beloved film genres because they evoke a sense of wistful nostalgia for simpler times when right and wrong and good and evil were easier to define and we admired and emulated heroic qualities.

Lonely are the brave cast