As he makes his way up the slope, Jack briefly comes face to face with a mangy mountain lion -- like him, a once-proud creature who seems to have found the last place left where he can live in peace.
Like its fence-hopping hero, "Lonely Are the Brave" enthusiastically disregards boundaries. Douglas, his movie-star charisma at full glow, plays his most sustained and layered scenes opposite Gena Rowlands, whose seamless naturalism brings out a side of Douglas unseen elsewhere. The movie itself straddles, not always successfully, the line between sweeping allegory and tactile grit.
Although the film never goes long without a bit of comic relief, or at least one of Douglas' blinding grins, it has moments of muted savagery. (It could have been harsher: In his script notes, Abbey suggested a shot in which a dog's corpse is progressively ground into the highway by a stream of passing cars.)
The leaden irony of its last reel, foreshadowed by periodic cuts to Carroll O'Connor behind the wheel of his privy-bearing semi, is overcome by the violent conclusion of Jack's escape plan and the faraway look in his wide-open eyes.
There are times when "Lonely Are the Brave" could use a bit more of the cowboy spirit. The exchanges between Matthau and his bumbling deputy feel like sitcom banter designed to placate audiences who might otherwise mistake the movie's pessimistic underpinnings. Some boundaries fall, and others stay firmly in place.
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