Nicholas Ray (1952)

The title is puzzling, even more so after you’ve watched the film.  You know who the lusty men are but the phrase suggests a different kind of movie – something either square and hearty or camp.  It would be a struggle to accuse Nicholas Ray’s contemporary Western of any of those things.  The source material is a 1946 Life magazine feature by Claude Stanush entitled ‘King of the Cowboys’.  That sounds more commercially appealing and usefully carries a hint of potential irony.

According to an informative essay on The Lusty Men by Jonah Horwitz[1], Stanush’s piece was a profile of Bob Crosby – ‘”Wild Horse Bob”, a 26-year veteran and the greatest champion of the North American rodeo circuit’.  The Crosby-inspired figure in the film is Texan Jeff McCloud (Robert Mitchum), who decides to end his lengthy rodeo career when a bull throws and injures him.  He hitchhikes to his childhood home, now dilapidated and owned by an elderly man called Jeremiah (Burt Mustin).  Jeff’s arrival there and his immediately following conversation with Jeremiah are a highlight of the whole film.  The script hasn’t informed us where Jeff was heading but his approach to the ranch is accompanied by music that unequivocally announces Western homecoming (and turns out to be the main theme of Roy Webb’s score).  Robert Mitchum’s lack of sentimentality is invaluable here, deflating as it does the music’s nostalgic swell.  Entering the place, Jeff looks for a boyhood cache in the crawl space under the ranch house.  Ray’s camera (Lee Garmes was the cinematographer) follows him there imaginatively.

The exchange between Jeff and Jeremiah, two differently solitary men, is ended by the appearance outside the house of a married couple.  In Jeremiah’s words:

‘That cowhand from the jackhammer ranch, him and his wife … Do it regular every Sunday… Come prowling around with calf eyes, saying how much they’d like to buy the place … Where’s a ranch hand going to get $5,000?’

Jeff was about to resume his road journey – ‘to Abilene by sundown’ – but his plans change on meeting Wes Merritt (Arthur Kennedy) and, especially, his wife Louise (Susan Hayward).  Their triangle of relationships is a major element of what follows.  The answer to Jeremiah’s question about the $5,000 is that Wes is secretly ambitious for a lucrative rodeo career and hopes that Jeff can help him towards it.

The protracted reworking of the material detailed by Jonah Horwitz helps explain the five names on the screenplay credit, including Horace McCoy, author of the novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?   (The others are David Dortort, Alfred Hayes, Andrew Solt and the film’s co-producer, Jerry Wald.)   Watching The Lusty Men today brings the title of McCoy’s best-known work worryingly to mind.  One hopes none of the horses – or bulls – involved in the numerous rodeo sequences was seriously hurt but the arena thrills and spills (edited by triple Oscar-winner Ralph Dawson) are sometimes hair-raising, and the movie long pre-dates Hollywood’s no-animals-were-harmed assurances

The dialogue is strong but, even if you take out the rodeo stuff, The Lusty Men is long (113 minutes all told), given what the story comprises.  Mitchum is convincingly part of the rodeo world and his laconic reserve repeatedly pays dividends, though this viewer (as usual) didn’t get a lot from him once the main dramatic focus was on Jeff’s relationship with Louise.  Susan Hayward is credibly hard-bitten and good in her character’s terse, sarcastic moments.  Hayward’s eagerness to do more and lack of nuance combine to ensure that Louise’s longer speeches work less well.

It’s Arthur Kennedy’s Wes who’s consistently impressive.  Wes is far from young (Kennedy, in his late thirties at the time, was actually three years older than Mitchum) and doesn’t look physically cut out for action-man competition.  It’s not easy to suspend disbelief in Wes’s meteoric rise to the top of the rodeo game, as he wins contests across several states, but Kennedy conveys the man’s determination – and his own surprise at succeeding – strongly enough to sell it.  Wes is so keen to ingratiate himself with a big rodeo name that he’s blind for some time to the growing mutual attraction between Jeff and Louise; or perhaps (more interestingly) he’s so preoccupied with furthering his ambition that he’s unconsciously willing to take the risk of losing his wife to another.

In the climax to The Lusty Men, in Pendleton, Oregon, Jeff makes an ill-fated rodeo comeback.  When he dies from his injuries, Wes, who’d been ready to abandon Louise and the purchase of Jeremiah’s ranch for the sake of more success and money in rodeo, comes to his senses.  The tension between Louise’s professed loyalty to her husband and her feelings for Jeff breaks effectively when the latter has what proves to be his fatal accident, and she rushes to his bedside.  Yet the prominence of Louise’s reaction to Jeff’s death makes for an ending that’s not only abrupt but rather bewildering.

As Wes decides to quit rodeo and buy the ranch, Jeff’s old pal Booker Davis (Arthur Hunnicutt) – once a rodeo champion himself, now past it and poor – asks Wes if there’s any chance of a job at the ranch for him and his daughter Rusty (Carol Nugent).  Wes says yes.  ‘Rusty, me and you is going back to Texas’, Booker delightedly tells his daughter.  Wes and Louise leave the rodeo venue reunited; over the public address comes the announcement of the next competitor to enter the arena.  Nicholas Ray thus undercuts Booker’s heartwarming homecoming moment – rather as Robert Mitchum’s presence did Jeff’s earlier one.  In doing this, though, Ray in effect forgets about Louise – so that she seems to have got over Jeff’s death instantly.  In light of her grief a couple of screen minutes earlier, this is bizarre.  It upstages the dangerous-macho-show-must-go-on message that Ray seems to have intended as his film’s last word and parting shot.

25 June 2019

[1] At http://cinema.wisc.edu/blog/2015/10/29/lusty-men-never-cowboy-couldnt-be-throwed.  Although Wikipedia reckons the Stanush piece was called ‘The King of the Cowpokes’, Horwitz says otherwise.  He also traces the several name changes that the project went through.