Lonely are the Brave (Universal Backlot Series)
by David Miller
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Carroll O'Connor, Gena Rowlands, George Kennedy, Kirk Douglas, Walter MatthauDirector: David Miller
Brand: Universal Studios
Cinematographer: Philip H. Lathrop
Composer: Jerry Goldsmith
Editor: Edward Mann
Editor: Leon Barsha
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 107 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2009-07-07
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Universal Studios
Movie Reviews of Lonely are the Brave (Universal Backlot Series)
Movie Review: Mr. Trumbo's Dialectic
Summary: 5 Stars
I will not pretend to be "objective" about this film. It is one of the tightest, best films I have ever seen. I saw it when it first came out, at a period in my life when I was heavily involved in the Anti-war movement at the University of Illinois, Urbana. The film and Mr Douglas spoke to me at a watershed moment in my life, and, in a very real sense, I have never recovered emotionally from it or the finely wrought characters it portrayed.
The film is divided into three parts, not unlike the triadic program of Aaron Copeland's "Lincoln Portrait." In the first part we are not only introduced to the man, the cowboy John W. Burns--shown his character strengths and his flaws--but we are given as well intimations of the fate awaiting him at the end of the film. The middle part of "Lonely are the Brave" begins with his going off to get drunk, thrown in jail, and help him break out. He tells his friend he knows of a place where he and the friend (along with the latter's wife and son) can flee this bankrupt civilization. As he tells his friend, he knows of a vally in which the authorities will never find them. There he and his friend and family will live as they had once dreamt of living when they had been young--as "natural men."
In the middle third of the film, we are introduced to that bankrupt civilization and the cripples and cowards it necessarily must reproduce in each and every generation. We also are introduced to a handful of persons who have been coopted by the infernal industrial machine, but who, however compromised, still recognize a comrade and kindred spirit in the man they are pursuing.
The film thus introduces in its first two parts, the "Lonely Cowboy (the title of Edward Abbey's novel from which the motion picture story was adapted), the industrial society and its apparatchicks, his actual adversaries. The final movement of the film begins with Burn's escape from jail and recounts the struggle between our hero, flawed as he is, and those who are hunting him down. I will break off my description at this point of the film.
Let me close by adding a couple of points of praise that have not always been mentioned by most online reviewers. Dalton Trumbo, cantankerous old Red that he was, has written a brilliant script. It is, quite frankly, better that the Abbey novel. Second Jerry Goldsmith's beautiful score with its laconic solo brass work is as stunning, as is its rucously punctuated humor(example?--the bar scene).
Though I do not have Trumbo's "Additional Dialgues " before me, in a letter he wrote to Douglas upon seeing the film's final cut, Trumbo sums up the film and Douglas's role succinctly. He tells Douglas that every so often the planets and stars align themselves so that an actor encounters and executes a role so splendidly that the actor and character become one.
Borrowing from observations concerning the art of tragedy, I would add that when art achieves its ends, as was done in "Lonely are the Brave," members of the audience can be morally transformed as to recognizing the possibilities of their own potential self-elevation. In my own case,"Lonely are the Brave," like Visconti's "The Leopard," have become just such benchmarks of moral instruction.
Summary of Lonely are the Brave (Universal Backlot Series)
Academy Award winner Kirk Douglas ignites the screen with one of his most personal roles as a cowboy on a collision course with the modern world in Lonely are the Brave. After landing himself in jail trying to break out his friend, Jack Burns (Douglas) finds himself alone and on the run from the law. Leading the manhunt is Sheriff Morey Johnson (Walter Matthau), who must bring Burns to justice despite his own sympathy for the fugitive. Co-starring Gena Rowlands, George Kennedy and Carroll O?Connor, Lonely are the Brave is an unforgettable portrait of a lawless man defying life in an orderly world.Similar DVD Movies
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