‘62 WESTERN:Lonely Are the Brave

But the wily cowboy played by Douglas is resourceful enough to down the helicopter with a great gunshot. Free of the surveillance by the clattering contraption above Douglas makes it to the top of the cliff, but not before he has anticipated the ambush party, outwitted them, lured them into separate traps, and dispatched them one by one. He has broken out of the sheriff’s trap, albeit with a bullet wound to the leg. But that is a minor nuisance. The sheriff meanwhile from down below has heard the action near the top of the cliff and orders his driver to take him to the top. Their jeep roars up to the top just in time to see Douglas and horse disappear, riding off triumphantly into thick woods where the jeep-mounted police cannot follow. The sheriff and his mechanized, radio-controlled, air-supported, data-base assisted forces give up, beaten. Against all odds our lone hero and his horse have made a monkey of the sheriff with his numerical superiority and all his high technology.

But Douglas and his horse have to cross a busy 4-lane highway (US-70) on their way to real sanctuary in Mexico or somewhere. In a sad ending to the film the horse is panicked by the noise of traffic while crossing the roadway and hit by a swerving tractor-trailer carrying a trailer load of toilet bowls from the east, probably to an orderly new suburban development in California. Amid the screech of brakes and the screams of the horse and after a dizzying few seconds of the smash, the cowboy and his horse lay pathetically injured in the mud by the roadside, separated but calling in their different ways to one another. The horse at least is mortally wounded and the police finish him off with a rifle shot. The cowboy, badly injured too, is put in an ambulance under police guard, and driven off to who knows what fate.

Our splendid hero could overcome everything that the heartless authorities could throw at him in the wilds. All the paraphernalia of bureaucratic modernity were no match for the lone cowboy’s strength, his fieldcraft, his knowledge of the wilds, his cowboy cunning and his daring, plus his wonderful horse, but he couldn’t survive a random encounter with a truck on a busy 4-lane highway! Such is the stuff of modern legend. The big trucks, the traffic and the highway represent an intractable evil, a cruel force which mechanistically, carelessly, cuts down heroes.

Maybe stuff like this is deep in the American psyche and perhaps accounts for some of the passion with which many people think of big trucks and modern highways?