Re: Lonely are the Brave

[ALI KADRI <akadri_00@xxxxxxxxx>]

In the Myth of Sisyphus the suffering begins not with
rolling the rock up the hill, but in his thoughts
about the fatality of his condition as he freely walks
down the hill to pick up his rock. This is the danger
of mixing working class conditions with free leisure
time.
--- Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> When we first saw "Lonely are the Brave" in 1962, my
> fellow Bard College
> students and I found it possible to appreciate the
> film on two levels. It
> was similar to Sam Peckinpah's "Ride the High
> Country" and other films
> meditating on cowboy as beloved anachronism. This
> cowboy is a symbol
> confronting all the new forces--the automobile,
> barbed-wire,
> etc.--impinging on the last bastion of freedom, the
> old west.
>
> In the opening scene of "Lonely are the Brave," we
> see Jack Burns (Kirk
> Douglas) stretched out in front of a campfire with
> his horse by his side.
> His restful contemplation of the awesome beauty of
> the New Mexico high
> country is then interrupted by the raucous sound of
> a squadron of military
> jets flying in formation overhead.
>
> On another level the film seemed to evoke some of
> the beat generation
> literature that many of us had read as high school
> students. In novels and
> poems hearkening back to Thoreau's "Walden Pond,"
> the beats rejected
> civilization and embraced the simpler, freer and
> more rustic world of the
> ranch hand, hobo or forest ranger. These were the
> sorts of characters who
> cropped up in Kerouac's novels and found particular
> expression in the life
> and work of Gary Snyder, the Buddhist poet who saw
> the Pacific Northwest
> forests as a sanctuary from the corporate greed and
> mindlessness of the
> Eisenhower era.
>
> Now--nearly 40 years later--that I have learned the
> full story behind the
> making of "Lonely are the Brave," the beat
> generation associations not only
> become more meaningful, I also understand the
> importance of the film to the
> radical movement since it brought together two
> disparate strands of the
> American left: the screenplay was by Dalton Trumbo,
> one of the greatest
> blacklisted writers in Hollywood, while the
> screenplay itself was based on
> one of Edward Abbey's anarchist/deep ecology
> masterpieces, "The Brave Cowboy."
>
> The driving force behind the movie came from Kirk
> Douglas, who was one of
> the first to challenge the blacklist by insisting
> that Dalton Trumbo write
> the screenplay for "Spartacus" only 3 years earlier
> in 1958. Douglas, who
> often co-starred in mindless beefcake spectacles
> with Burt Lancaster, was
> not at all like the characters he played in films.
> He was the son of a
> Russian Jewish ragman from the Lower East Side and a
> product like so many
> in the entertainment industry of the vast cultural
> and social forces
> embodied in the New Deal radicalization. While never
> a Communist himself,
> he believed that the blacklist was evil and put his
> reputation on the line
> by standing up for Trumbo. (Lancaster was not what
> he appeared as well. In
> real life, he was bisexual and something of a
> radical.)
>
> After a couple of years tending sheep, Jack Burns
> has come to town to break
> his old friend Paul out of jail. Paul is a scholar
> about to be transferred
> to a penitentiary to begin serving a two year for
> running a modest
> underground railroad for undocumented workers from
> Mexico.
>
> Since the only way he can free Paul is by becoming a
> prisoner himself, he
> goes to town to find a saloon where booze and
> trouble often go together. He
> is not disappointed. As soon as he takes a seat in
> one such establishment
> to begin enjoying a bottle of whiskey with a beer
> chaser, a one-armed man
> hurls an empty bottle at his head. In keeping with a
> innate sense of fair
> play, Burns uses one arm to fight the man in a lusty
> barroom brawl that
> honors the best traditions of the Western film.
>
> After he is arrested, he finds himself in the
> holding pen with Paul where
> he lays out his escape plan. With the two hacksaws
> he has smuggled inside
> his boots, the two should be able to break out
> before morning arrives. Paul
> demurs. He has a wife and a young son. The sentence
> for jail break in New
> Mexico is 5 years. He would prefer to serve out his
> term and return to a
> normal life. While a jail break might deliver
> freedom in the short run, it
> also would sentence him and his family to a life on
> the run.
>
> Although Jack can not persuade him to break out, he
> himself has no qualms.
> With the assistance of Paul and other prisoners, he
> cuts through the bars
> to the street below. He then returns to Paul's house
> where he has left his
> horse. From there, he heads toward the mountains,
> beyond which Mexico and
> freedom await.
>
> >From this point, the main action of the film takes
> place, pitting the lone
> resourceful cowboy against a posse made up of local
> lawmen and a helicopter
> deployed by the same airforce base whose jets
> disturbed his peace in the
> opening scene of the movie. In charge of the whole
> operation is Sheriff
> Monty Johnson (Walter Matthau) who seems to harbor a
> secret desire to see
> the prisoner escape. This is understandable since
> Johnson, and most of the
> audience watching the film, probably felt trapped by
> American civilization
> in the early 1960s. This world was described by Gary
> Snyder in the
> following terms in the poem "Front Lines":
>
> A bulldozer grinding and slobbering
> Sideslipping and belching
> The skinned-up bodies of still-live bushes
> In the pay of a man
> >From town.
>
> Behind is a forest that goes to the Arctic
> And a desert that still belongs to the Piute
> And here we must draw
> Our line
>
> Although we identify with Jack Burns's bid for
> freedom, there is a
> foreboding sense that it will not be successful. As
> he climbs up the
> mountain with his horse in tow, we feel that he will
> be captured at any
> moment. This climb might have reminded many college
> students of the Myth of
> Sisyphus that Albert Camus had interpreted as a
> symbol of the existential
> fate of modern man. In this Greek myth the hero
> pushes a boulder up a hill
> for all eternity. Just as he is about to reach the
> summit and freed of his
> burden, the boulder comes tumbling down on him. For
> Camus, this represents
> the failure of 20th century man to achieve
> deliverance from the oppressive
> social and economic forces that control him. Even
> ideologies like Marxism
> that promised freedom only served to erect new
> barriers.
>
> Although the film resonates with such overarching
> philosophical concerns,
> you have to turn to Abbey's novel to find their full
> expression, especially
> the scene in which Jack explains his decision to
> break jail to Paul's wife
> Jerry.
>
> ---
> "You say you?re going to hide for a few days?what
> does that mean? What
> then? Where will you go?"
>
> Burns ate heartily; a touch of egg adorned his
> beard. "I can go north, west
> or south. Winters comin so I guess I?ll go south:
> Chihuahua or maybe
> Sonora, dependin on how things look."
>
> "What will you do down there?"
>
> "I dunno. Just live, I guess." He swabbed his plate
> with
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