In the film, Jack Burns (Kirk Douglas) rides freely throughout modern New Mexico, even if it means cutting his way through barbed-wire fences.

This is what attracted me to the story - the difficulty of being an individual today.' He explained, 'It happens to be a point of view I love. He fell in love with the story and demanded that Universal allow him to make it into a film. In 1960, Douglas read a paperback copy of the source novel, The Brave Cowboy: An Old Tale In A New Time by author Edward Abbey ( The Monkey Wrench Gang). So begins Lonely Are The Brave (1962), Kirk Douglas' favorite of all his films. The sheriff arrives, shoots the injured animal to end its misery, and quietly speaks the lonely cowboy's epitaph.Ī cowboy asleep on his bedroll is awakened by a sound and pauses to smile wryly as a jet zooms overhead. Crossing a highway at night, Whisky balks at the oncoming traffic, and both the horse and Burns are hit by a diesel truck. When the helicopter spots him, he shoots it down and heads for the Mexican border. The local sheriff, a kindly and philosophic man, organizes a posse of seven deputies equipped with a jeep and a helicopter, while Burns, refusing to abandon his horse though he would make better time on foot, slowly climbs a steep mountainside. So Burns breaks out alone, gets food and ammunition from Bondi's wife, Jerri, with whom he has been romantically involved, and heads for the hills with his horse, Whisky. Hoping to help Bondi escape, Burns deliberately becomes involved in a barroom brawl and is thrown into the same jail, but Bondi prefers to serve his sentence rather than spend the rest of his life on the run.

Jack Burns, an itinerant cowboy whose individualism clashes with modern-day life, rides down from the mountains when he learns that his friend Paul Bondi has been jailed for helping illegal immigrants across the Mexican border.

Lonely are the brave cast