Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Megamind To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

Doomtomylo a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

Rexanne It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

LeonLouisRicci The Western Movie was a Prolific Part of the Human Psyche and therefore Culture in the 1950's and was so "Done to Death" on the Silver Screen and the "Idiot Box" and those not Completely Enchanted by its Charm were Prone to Overdose.America's Love and Fascination with "Tales of the Old West" is Understandable and the Individualism and Free Spirit of the "Cowhand" is Seductive and Sustenance for the Soul of Folks Seeking to be Free.This Film is Layered with a Dooming Determinism by Society to "Corral", Ridicule, Ostracized, or Imprison these "Rebels" who Value Liberty with Few Restrictions. Classic. Kirk Douglas Stars as a Modern Day "Throwback" to a Time and Place of Wide Open Spaces, a "Don't Fence Me In" Attitude and Philosophy.In the Early Sixties such Folks were a Dying (more accurately killed) Breed. Similar Themes Crop Up in Popular Movies, like "Easy Rider" (1969), the works of Director Sam Peckinpah, and "First Blood", aka "Rambo 1"(1982).Blacklisted Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo Penned the Script for His Friend Douglas and its Story is Classic Trumbo. Characters in this well Regarded, if Under-Seen Film, are Entertainingly Defined and Poignant. Walter Matthau is Memorable and so is Gena Rowlands as His Friend's Wife and Confidant.A Little Seen Film that has been "Lost" and Virtually Forgotten but is Slowly Returning to the Collective Consciousness of Film Fans and Historians. It's Not a Perfect Picture with some Character Behavior Questionable and the Ending is Contrived but Emotionally Effective.Note..."Whisky" the Cowboy's horse figures prominently in the Movie and deserves recognition and respect. After all, what would a Western Hero be without His beloved and necessary partner/companion.

James Hitchcock To celebrate the recent 100th birthday of that great actor Kirk Douglas, only the second major male star (after Bob Hope) to reach that particular milestone, I turn to one of his greatest films, indeed the one which he himself regards as his favourite. Like a number of more recent films such as Pollack's "The Electric Cowboy" and Eastwood's "Bronco Billy", it is a modern-day Western which explores the way in which the legend of the Old West continues to affect modern American society.Douglas's character, John W. "Jack" Burns, is a modern-day ranch hand who regards himself as the heir to the cowboy tradition. He has a lot in common with Dempsey Rae, the character Douglas played in "Man without a Star". Both are wandering cowhands of no fixed abode, sleeping wherever they find a place. Both hate any attempt to restrict where they can go or what they can do, with a particular hatred of barbed-wire fences. As Jack puts it: "A westerner likes open country. That means he's got to hate fences. And the more fences there are, the more he hates them." Jack does not just hate modern laws, he also hates modern technology; he does not own a car and travels everywhere on horseback. He refuses to carry any form of identification, such as a driving licence; as he says "I don't need cards to figure out who I am, I already know." The difference, of course, is that "Man without a Star" was set in the late nineteenth century, the heyday of the Old West when the roaming cowboy lifestyle was widely accepted. Jack finds himself living in the 1960s and his attempt to live by the code of the previous century is seen as a dangerous challenge to the values of modern society. A homeless man is no longer seen as a free spirit but as either a mentally unstable vagabond or as a potential criminal. In the 1880s a dislike of fences could be seen as an attempt to uphold the "law of the open range" which was being violated by unscrupulous farmers; by 1962 it is coming to look, at least to the eyes of society, like an attack on the sacred principle of private property.Jack learns that an old friend, Paul Bondi, has been imprisoned for assisting illegal immigrants. He forms a plan to rescue Paul from jail, and decides that in order to do this is he needs to get arrested himself. He gets involved in a bar-room brawl, and when the police refuse to bring charges forces them to arrest him by assaulting an officer. Once inside the jail, however, he discovers that Paul does not want to be rescued, as he realises that any attempt to escape would only result in his being given an even heavier sentence. Jack breaks out of jail himself and goes on the run, pursued by the police. This being the twentieth century, of course, the forces of the law have at their disposal technology, such as helicopters, which would not have been available to a nineteenth-century posse. Jack has to use his skills and his knowledge of the terrain in a desperate attempt to stay ahead of his pursuers.Douglas did not just star in "Lonely Are the Brave", he also produced it after acquiring the rights to the novel it is based on, Edward Abbey's "The Brave Cowboy". To write the screenplay Douglas hired the still officially blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, with whom he had earlier worked on "Spartacus". The character of Jack probably owes something to Abbey's anarchist views, of which Douglas said "It happens to be a point of view I love. This is what attracted me to the story – the difficulty of being an individual today".Looking at the story objectively, it would be difficult to deny that Jack has a self-destructive streak a mile wide; his scheme for freeing Paul from the jail seems particularly hare-brained. Yet it would also be difficult to deny that, as played by Douglas, Jack comes across as the film's hero, not its villain. In that final chase it is Jack and his faithful horse Whiskey for whom we are rooting, not his mechanised pursuers. Even Morey Johnson, the sheriff charged with hunting him down, feels some sympathy with him. (The relationship between Jack and Morey may have influenced the portrayal of another relationship between pursuer and pursued, that between Harrison Ford's Dr Kimble and Tommy Lee Jones's marshal in "The Fugitive", made thirty years after this film). Douglas gives one of his greatest performances here, and he receives good support from Walter Matthau as Morey).David Miller appears to have been a prolific director, but this is only the second of his films which I have seen; the first was that mediocre comedy "The Opposite Sex", a film about as different from "Lonely Are the Brave" as one could imagine. Here, however, his direction is masterly. The film was made in black-and-white, an unusual choice for the early sixties when colour was fast becoming the default setting for film-makers, at least in America, but in my view the right one. Miller's stark photography of the Western landscapes (here in New Mexico) is reminiscent of Raoul Walsh's in that other great film about a man on the run in the mountains of the West, "High Sierra" from 1941. It makes a fitting backdrop to the tragedy of Jack Burns, a free spirit in a society which pays lip-service to the principle of freedom but which distrusts those who try to live by that principle. 9/10

classicsoncall What a difference a half century makes. When Jeri Bondi (Gena Rowlands) laments her husband's incarceration for helping illegals cross the border, she mentions the consequences one might face for violating real borders, real fences, real laws, and consequently, getting mixed up in real trouble. No way anyone involved with the picture could have foreseen the day when all of the 'real borders' stuff is just a moot point, and authorities are told to stand down by a lawless administration. This film couldn't even be made today, it wouldn't have any relevance.I'm reading some of the other reviews for this movie and scratching my head over the comments linking it to "First Blood". From the outset in that film, Rambo was the character who was being provoked; here it's Jack Burns (Kirk Douglas) doing the provoking all the way. I didn't find Burns to be a sympathetic character in that respect as he went looking for trouble and generally found it. With Stallone's Rambo, you want to root for the guy who's being pursued by a megalomaniac sheriff who has a distorted sense of right and wrong. Sure, you had Gutierrez (George Kennedy) here as the stand in for Brian Dennehy's Sheriff Teasle, but he was an ancillary character. The principal sheriff, Morey Johnson (Walter Matthau) appeared to have a more realistic approach to apprehending Burns. When he didn't 'recognize' him at the end of the story as the man he was chasing, it said a lot about the sympathy he had for a man defying the odds and coming up short.There's an aura of the passing of the Old West that's quite pervasive with this story, and a lot more pronounced with the juxtaposition of Burns out in the wilderness and all of modern day technology (for 1962) brought to bear against him. Burns himself describes what it's like to be the last cowboy when he explains to Jeri why they never hooked up - "Cause I'm a loner clear down deep to my very guts. You know what a loner is? He's a born cripple. He's crippled because the only person he can live with is himself". I've spent a lot of time thinking about that because for this cowboy it strikes very close to home.

doc-350 Some 72 different reviews that I saw... most proclaim the movie as very good to excellent while one or two pan it and say 'Burns got what he deserved.' Interesting as the film portrays without really endorsing (aside from the fact that the 'to be Libertarian' Jack Burns is the hero) a man who feels that 'freedom' is valuable enough to engage in behavior that potentially could cost that rare commodity. Brave but some have said foolish. The film is engaging in that a variety of 'types' are represented. Certainly no one can argue that Matthau is a 'type' as are Rowlands (the wife in love with someone else perhaps) and the 'brutal' type of Kennedy's role. The buffoonery of some of the deputies and the over exuberance of the young Airmen... all types but mixed well in this film which I found extremely well done... and I was rooting for Whiskey all the time and there is NO mention of who owned or trained that splendid animal. The scenes urging her up the rocky cliffs was enough to suggest a Oscar for Whiskey. But the oncoming (Spoiler) 18 wheeler carrying toilets (would have been worse if it was toilet paper!) while close the book on Jack's valiant and brave efforts to elude his pursuers and get across the border(s) to freedom someplace else. The acting was superb by all and landscape, filming, locations... all really added greatly to the films attraction. Some might say that such an era is past but freedom loving people are still around who will die for it and, as many might suggest that such freedoms are waning, perhaps we'll see many such Jack Burns rising up to engage the Gutierrezs of today's oppressive society. Great film (spoiler alert)with a tragic ending but Burn's soul will not be snuffed out. Douglas is good in many films but I 'like' him in this one and, as Matthau discovered, such men are hard to corral if not impossible.