General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Lonely Are the Brave

Lonely Are the Brave is a 1962 American Western directed by David Miller, starring Kirk Douglas as Jack Burns, a modern-day cowboy who lands himself in jail to break out a friend and then finds himself hunted across the New Mexico mountains by a law-enforcement machinery of helicopters and patrol cars. The screenplay is by Dalton Trumbo, adapted from Edward Abbey's 1956 novel The Brave Cowboy, and the film was produced by Douglas's own circle at Universal through Joel Productions.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	24 May 1962; 107 minutes; Western (also classed as drama); black and white¹^•³
Source	Edward Abbey's 1956 novel The Brave Cowboy; screen rights optioned by Douglas's Bryna Productions, announced 19 February 1958¹
Principal cast	Kirk Douglas (Jack Burns), Gena Rowlands (Jerri Bondi), Walter Matthau (Sheriff Johnson), Michael Kane (Paul Bondi), Carroll O'Connor, George Kennedy (Gutierrez)⁴
Key crew	Director David Miller; screenplay Dalton Trumbo; producer Edward Lewis; cinematography Philip Lathrop; music Jerry Goldsmith¹^•⁴
Production	Joel Productions (Universal-International Films); shot in New Mexico in black-and-white widescreen¹^•³
Critical standing	93% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (14 reviews) and 85% on the audience Popcornmeter (1,000+ ratings)⁵
Douglas's view	The role of Jack Burns was one of Douglas's own favorites, and his son Michael ranks the film first among his father's more than 80 movies³

Spoilers

Plot

Jack Burns is a ranch hand and drifter who feels out of place in the modern world. He deliberately gets into a barroom fight so that he will be imprisoned alongside his friend Paul Bondi (Michael Kane), who is serving time for helping illegal immigrants. Jack tries to persuade Paul to flee with him, but Paul, a family man, has too much at stake. After a beating from a sadistic deputy (George Kennedy), Jack escapes alone and heads for the hills, and an extensive manhunt breaks out, led by Sheriff Morey Johnson (Walter Matthau), who must bring Burns to justice despite his own sympathy for the fugitive.²^•⁵

The pursuit is the film's centerpiece. Burns rides his horse Whiskey toward the Rocky Mountains while the sheriff recruits a U.S. Air Force helicopter to help in the search, and the chase ends tragically for both man and horse.³^•⁶ Gena Rowlands plays Jerri Bondi, Paul's wife and the woman who loves the cowboy.⁴

Production

The project began with the novel. On 19 February 1958 the trade press announced that Kirk Douglas's Bryna Productions had optioned screen rights to Edward Abbey's 1956 novel The Brave Cowboy, and by August 1958 preparations to film were underway.¹ Universal had rejected the project, but Douglas had a special arrangement at Universal after the success of Spartacus: if he loved a book and the studio had nixed it, the studio would reverse its decision provided he could budget the production under $3 million. That deal is how Lonely Are the Brave became a reality.³

Trumbo and the blacklist. The screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Douglas had already challenged the blacklist by insisting that Trumbo be credited under his own name for Spartacus in 1960, and Trumbo received screen credit here as well.⁷^•⁸ The film's jailed friend Paul, a writer imprisoned over ideological issues, resembles the recently blacklisted screenwriter, a resemblance the film's own reviewers have noted as deliberate.⁹

The film was photographed by Philip Lathrop in black-and-white widescreen (2.35:1) on location in New Mexico, with a score by Jerry Goldsmith that, according to the critic Alex Cox, was the composer's first.³^•⁶ The Spanish release title was Valientes andan solos los.¹⁰

Themes and reception

The film dramatizes the collision between the cowboy's individual freedom and an increasingly regimented, technological America. Its opening shows Burns asleep on the range with his horse until jets thunder overhead, and he later tries to ride across a freeway of speeding cars; a character tells him, "the world that you live in doesn't exist anymore, Jack.... Maybe it never did!"⁹ Critics have read it as an elegy for the vanishing Old West, its heroes and their mores, replaced by a modern world dominated by progress and technology.⁵

Alex Cox, the director and screenwriter, called it in Film Comment something rare and almost unique, a leftist American western, and observed that its concerns, individual freedom versus authoritarian clampdowns, the criminalization of sanctuary for "illegal aliens," ID cards, and military helicopters in border manhunts, still seemed current when he wrote in 2007.⁶ Film scholars Helena Bacon of the University of Suffolk and Mark Jancovich of the University of East Anglia later used the film's name for both a 2021 conference and a 2023 special issue of the European Journal of American Culture devoted to rethinking the postwar Western, arguing that the genre was always in a constant process of revision rather than passing through a single classic-to-revisionist turning point.¹¹

Reputation. The film came and went without a fuss on release, but its standing has grown.¹² Douglas long professed that it contained one of his own favorite performances, and Steven Spielberg has praised it.⁵^•³ Time Out's review credits Miller with an eloquent feeling for landscape, making excellent use of Lathrop's monochrome photography as the cowboy is pursued by helicopters into the mountains, while finding Trumbo's message sometimes too heavily underlined.¹³ The film is available on digital and DVD from Universal and on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber Studio Classics.²^•³

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026