2/24/2023 0 Comments Lonely are the brave cast![]() ![]() Jack decides to pick several fights and land himself in the same gaol and break out with his friend. But when he meets Paul’s wife Gerri (Gena Rowlands in an early film role after several years in TV) he discovers is serving time in gaol for helping Mexican migrants. He’s come to find Paul (Michael Kane), a friend who shares his ideas about individual freedoms. He cuts the wire and symbolically moves from the open range into the modern world. When he rises and re-mounts, Jack discovers a wire fence and beyond it the outskirts of a town in New Mexico. This is one of the oppositions ‘over-emphasised’ in the opening scene. He looks up and sees the vapour trails of military jets across the sky. Kirk Douglas plays Jack Burns, introduced to us as a cowboy resting on a hillside with his horse Whisky. Lonely Are the Brave is a ‘Twilight Western’ – a film which deals with the death of the culture and mythology associated with the Western ‘frontier’ in American history. Before I forget though, the opening titles tell us this is a ‘contemporary Western’, simply by the typography and graphic design. Instead I want to discuss the film in terms of various issues about genre in the 1960s and specifically the Western. ![]() McArthur’s aim was to discuss issues related to the development of structuralist ideas in film studies in the early 1970s, but I’m not going to pursue that argument here. 58 (Winter 2015/16), analysing the opening of the film in terms of mise en scène and the seemingly obvious use of binary oppositions to introduce its narrative. I have also been intrigued by a short piece by Colin McArthur in the Media Education Journal No. ![]() Currently streaming on MUBI, Lonely Are the Brave is one of the Westerns I’ve always wanted to watch because of its reputation as a form of contemporary Western. ![]()
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