The Lusty Men

Nick Ray's family had a bad reputation in LaCrosse, Wisconsin -- Ray (born Raymond Kienzle, Jr.) said he was raised "under the scourge of alcoholism"; his father was a  building contractor andmean drunk.  Ray fled his unhappy upbringing, first to Chicago, then to Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship, then, further, to New York and, ultimately, Hollywood where his demons caught up with him. Motifs of flight from poverty and alcoholic squalor are dominant in many of Ray's films.  In his first movie, They Live by Night (1947 -- released 1949) the doomed lovers, Bowie and Keechie, are running from the law:  he's a fugitive from Mississippi chain gang and she's the pregnant daughter of a gas station attendant.  In Ray's 1952 The Lusty Men, the characters are all fugitives, although in a more subtle sense:  the ambitious cow-hand, Wes Merritt (Arthur Kennedy) is married to Louise (Susan Haywood), a woman that he rescued from a "two-bit tamale joint" somewhere in the Southwest.  Jeff McCloud (Robert Mitchum) the film's catalyst for its plot, comes from a family impoverished and reputed by all in the neighborhood to be simply "no good."  Wes is not satisfied working as a cowpuncher and flees that life for a dangerous, transient existence as a rodeo competitor.  The film depicts the rodeo milieu in loving detail and reveals that the men who choose this sort of life are all fugitives from something, if only from the gnawing fear that they feel each time saddle-up.  One of the rodeo-wives, condemned to endless travel with men increasingly debilitated by injury and alcoholism says that the competitors are "drunk, dirty and scared."  Fear of injury and failure motivates the men to seek refuge in booze, floozies, and self-destructive gambling.  The rodeo riders are trapped within a lethal code of machismo that ultimately dooms them all.

Mitchum's character, Jeff McCloud, is a washed-up rodeo star, a man who once made $25,000 in one day, but now can barely walk because of the injuries that he has sustained.  After being gored by a
Brahma bull, Mitchum staggers away from the deserted rodeo arena while a wind whips paper trash across the dirt corral -- the shot is uniquely poetic and establishes from the outset the film's introspective tone; although rodeos are flamboyant, full of Indians in full regalia and commencing with the ritual "serpentine" ride, men and horses following an undulating column through the arena-corral,the film's principal action is all interior -- fears and desires that motivate the characters.  McCloud goes to a seemingly abandoned shack where he has hidden a toy gun and a box containing two nickels under the floor-boards.  When we see him pull the gun from the hiding place (he put it there when he was a boy), we expect the film to go in a certain direction -- crime, perhaps, people getting shot.  And, in fact, a nasty codger points a scatter-gun at McCloud when he eases himself out of the spider-hole under the shack.  But this is an indirection -- it turns out that the two nickels are symbolically more important than the wrecked gun.  One calamity that everyone is fleeing is poverty.

The ruinous shack was where McCloud was born -- it's the family home for his disreputable clan.  A young couple, Wes and Louise drive up in a jeep.  Wes works as a cow-hand at the neighboring farm.  He and his wife want to buy the house and ranch to start their own enterprise.  But they don't have any money.  Wes admires McCloud for his fame on the rodeo circuit.  After McCloud works for a while at the nearby ranch, roping and branding cows with Wes, the two men decide to leave cowpunching and pursue their fortune rodeoing (to use the term that the characters employ).  Louise is skeptical --she sees McCloud, accurately, as a "saddle-tramp" who has lost every penny that he ever earned.  But she reluctantly agrees to accompany the men on the circuit.  Wes will ride and take the risk of injury managed by Jeff who will advise him in exchange for 50% of the take -- an arrangement that turns out to be a matter of contention.  Wes is highly successful as a rodeo competitor and they make a lot of money.  But the rodeo circuit corrupts Wes -- he starts to become more and more like  his mentor, Jeff.  Finally, when there's enough money in the bank to buy the ranch in Texas, Wes balks -- he's now addicted to the fame and fortune attendant upon his success as a rodeo contestant.  Jeff makes a play for Wes' wife.  When she rejects him, Jeff has to prove his manhood somehow and so he pays the entry fee for a number of dangerous events at the Pendleton rodeo in Oregon -- notwithstanding the fact that he hasn't competed for a year and has serious disabilities that make his participation dangerous.  He gets thrown from a bronco, entangled in the stirrups and dragged.  When Jeff dies of a punctured lung, Wes sees the sees the error of his ways and with Louise departs the rodeo circuit, flush with cash to buy the ranch back in Texas.

Summarized, the plot seems simple-minded.  In fact, the film is astonishingly intelligent.  The motives of characters are very intricate.  A case-in-point is the decision by Jeff to take part in the final rodeo -- Jeff and Wes have just had a fistfight in which Wes accuses his manager of living off him and taking too large a percentage of his earnings.  Jeff has also attempted to seduce Louise, who, despite Wes' erring ways (he has reneged on the deal to quit rodeoing when they have enough money to buy the ranch and seems about to take up with a floozy, a kind of rodeo groupie), rejects Jeff's opportunistic proposal.  So Jeff has to prove to  himself that he's not a parasite, that he can still make money on the rodeo circuit; he has to show Louise that he's still a man, notwithstanding her rejection; and he has to atone, perhaps, for his cynical disloyalty in exploiting the marital problems between Wes and Louise.  Wes is the closest thing that Jeff has to a friend -- Mitchum's character is a loner with no attachments to anyone.  And he has betrayed Wes by trying to seduce his vulnerable wife.  Throughout the film, the picture of life that is presented is similarly realistic, and intricately detailed,  The film has a semi-documentary aspect -- it seems that most of the performers are real rodeo competitors and the details all ring true:  we are shown the sordid trailer parks where the performers live, learn about stock contractors (they supply the animals for the show), and get glimpses of the inner workings of the rodeo profession.  (At one party, the forever transient rodeo cowboys have stacked up suitcases to make an impromptu bar -- just one of many details that enliven the film.)  The acting by Mitchum and the other professionals is superlative -- Mitchum, for instance, doesn't know that he is in love with Louise and, only acts to seduce her, when another broken down former rodeo star says that "you never hung around long except to gamble or for a woman."  Mitchum doesn't try to sweeten his character -- Jeff is a cynical scoundrel, attractive but dangerous.  Ray was homosexual and the two most poignant and moving close-ups in the film show Wes wishing Jeff good luck before his fatal bout with the bucking bronco.  Arthur Kennedy, a perennial side-kick in movies like this, is perfectly cast as the ambitious, but non-charismatic Wes.  (In a key scene, Louise tells him that she had smarter, richer, tougher, and "prettier" suitors, but chose him because he shared her ethos that hard work leads to good fortune.)  Susan Haywood also couldn't be better.  The supporting cast of rodeo cowboys is also excellent.  Many of the men are marked with gruesome injuries.  The film has a gorgeous cowboy score by Roy Webb.

The dialogue is superb:  On marriage:  Mitchum say that he never got married notwithstanding his loneliness because "Marriage is lonely but it ain't private."  He says to Louise:  "They tell me anything's better than working in a tamale joint, even marriage."   On the rodeo circuit:  "It's chicken today, feathers tomorrow."  Jeff tells Louise that she has to forgive her husband because "that's a wife's professin, forgivin' her husband."  Before Jeff rides for the last time, Louise says:  "You think the more bones you break, the bigger man you'll be."  The floozy at the party says that she's going to put her brand on Wes and bites his arm hard.  Louise insults her, mocking her slinky attire  "I can't figure out if you're inside your dress and trying to get out or outside and trying to get in."

I saw this film a couple times twenty years ago and, first, watched some scenes from the movie as clips in Wim Wenders documentary about Ray's protracted death Lightning over Water.  For some reason, I alway imagine Mitchum limping out of the deserted corral to the left.  In fact, he walks to the right, that is, the direction of the future and the narrative.  However, when we see him next at the family ranch, he walks to the left -- that is, against the direction we read and into the past.