Lonely are the Brave

Bruce Dancis
Scripps Howard News

After Kirk Douglas helped break the Hollywood blacklist by hiring the well-known radical Dalton Trumbo to write the screenplay for 1960’s “Spartacus,” Douglas teamed up again with Trumbo on “Lonely Are the Brave.” But that excellent film, from 1962, which Trumbo adapted from Edward Abbey’s novel and stars Douglas as a cowboy who doesn’t fit in with life in modern America, has long been hard to see.

That changes this week with the release of “Lonely Are the Brave” on DVD as part of Universal Studios Home Entertainment’s Universal Backlot Series, along with three other adventure films ($19.98 apiece, not rated). Directed by David Miller, the movie succeeds as both a suspenseful chase-adventure tale and as a character study of a man who has become an anachronism in his own time.

“Lonely Are the Brave” states its point of view with a brilliant opening scene: As cowboy Jack Burns (Douglas) attempts to get some sleep in a makeshift outdoor campsite, his rest is disturbed by jet planes flying overhead. And as Burns rides on horseback to visit his best friend Paul Bondi (Michael Kane) and Bondi’s wife (Gena Rowlands, in only her second movie role), he and his horse must get past fences marked “Closed Area” and cross a highway crowded with cars and large trucks.

In a social commentary that could have been written yesterday, Trumbo’s screenplay has Bondi locked up in the county jail for two years for aiding illegal aliens from Mexico, by helping them find work and shelter. After a warm reunion with Rowlands’ character, with whom Burns clearly shares more than just an enduring friendship, the cowboy purposely gets himself arrested so he can see his old buddy. But when Burns finds a way to break out of jail, his friend decides to stay behind.

In a recently made DVD documentary, “Lonely Are the Brave: A Tribute,” Douglas calls the film “one of my favorites,” though he says he never liked the title, preferring the far more apt “The Last Cowboy.”

Douglas’ son, Michael Douglas, adds that it’s “my favorite picture that Dad has done.” Both father and son praise Trumbo’s work, with Michael Douglas saying that “Dalton Trumbo wrote a magnificent screenplay that was a great comment on society at that time.”

In addition to “Lonely Are the Brave,” the other movies out this week on DVD in the Universal Backlot Series are:

• “Beau Geste” (1939): Producer-director William Wellman’s yarn is about the three adventurous Geste brothers - played by Gary Cooper, Ray Milland and Robert Preston (who don’t in the slightest way resemble or sound like brothers) - joining the French Foreign Legion

• “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine” (1936): Director Henry Hathaway’s romantic drama is most notable for being the first Hollywood Technicolor film to be shot largely outdoors - with California’s Big Bear Lake and Big Bear Valley subbing for the Blue Ridge Mountains - and for providing early leading roles for future stars Henry Fonda and Fred MacMurray.

• “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” (1944): This Technicolor tale, directed by Arthur Lubin, reunites the stars of 1942’s “Arabian Nights” - Maria Montez (aka the Caribbean Cyclone) and Jon Hall - for another dubious adventure filled with intrigue, treachery and mistaken identities, and American, Latino and European actors portraying Arabs. (Can you imagine Andy Devine as Abdullah?)