Lonely and Brave

Spring garage cleaning is lonely and brave work and, coincidentally, it turned up no less than three copies of my favorite movie, Lonely Are the Brave. 

A 2002 New Mexico Magazine story gave a few facts about the film.  Like how Kirk Douglas arrived in Albuquerque from LA on April 30, 1961 to begin filming and how cast and crew stayed at the Western Skies Hotel.  Boy, now there's a part of uptown that went downhill.  The hotel was near Tijeras Canyon at the edge of the Sandias, a once resort-like location where the rich and famous visited - now a string of metal buildings, RV sales, mobile home parks and the ass-biting ugly streetscape of East Central.  Abbey would probably not be amused. Or surprised. 

Spring winds disrupted filming.  A 20 mule train was hired to haul heavy film equipment into place for filming the rugged chase scene up the west face of the Sandias.  A generator was hauled to the crest for power. 

Abbey had a bit part as a deputy that some say was cut from the film.  (Jack Loeffler, Adventures With Ed, p. 75.)    But I see him in a mountainside scene throwing a glass coke bottle.  I read confirmation of this somewhere but can't find it now.  Perhaps different versions exist or the reference is to a more substantial part being cut.

The New Yorker's criticism of the movie: (Loeffler):

Lonely Are the Brave  pretends to be a Western and has actually been hailed in some quarters as a "good" Western ... but its screenplay, by Dalton Trumbo, struck me as a shoddy and remarkably simple-minded song of hatred for twentieth-century American society.  What power the picture has springs from the irony of its starring All-American Kirk Douglas as a natural man going down in defeat under the continual brutal assaults of the industrial-capitalistic-governmental juggernaut.  The vulgarity of Mr. Trumbo's perceptions is that he has his hero, a cowboy on horseback, run down by an enormous trailer-truck filled with toilets.  There may be a lot wrong with this country, but Mr. Trumbo is plainly not the man to point it out.     

To which Abbey replied:

The New Yorker review of our movie calls it "shoddy and simple-minded, a song of hatred for 20th century society."  Exactly!  Exactly what I meant the book to be.  I am quite pleased with the reviewer's observation.  He stated the issues clearly.  The only reviewer that did so, so far as I know.

 

Comments

[Hunter]

It's a cowboy movie like High Noon is a cowboy movie.

[Inky Ink, Inc.]

Find anything ELSE during your spring cleaning???

[Coco la Boca]

No Dear.  I think someone else found your i-pod after the wedding. IOU1.

[Inky Ink, Inc.]

"Found"??

[Inky Ink, Inc.]

Hey, have you checked your glove compartment?

[Green Dragon]

Kirk Douglas: "Once I read about this modern-day cowboy still living by the code of the Old West...I had to make it into a movie...I think what attracted me to the book was that it had to do with a man trying to achieve freedom and how impossible it really is. Spartacus had the same theme. This is about enslavement in the modern age."
"I thought Brave Cowboy [the Abbey novel title] was ironic. I wanted to call it The Last Cowboy. Universal finally decided...that it should be called Lonely Are the Brave. To this day, I'm not sure what it means."
"It's the only time I know of a writer producing a perfect screenplay: one draft, no revisions...Lonely Are the Brave has become a cult classis. It is still my favorite."
Mine too.