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Lonely are the Brave is a 1962 movie adaptation of the Edward Abbey novel The Brave Cowboy. It stars Kirk Douglas as Jack Burns, and Walter Matthau as a sheriff who sympathizes with Burns but must do his job and chase him down.

The movie, like the book, is the story of a cowboy named John W. "Jack" Burns, who lives as a transient worker and roaming ranch hand much as the cowboys of old did, and refuses to join modern society. He rejects much of modern technology, will not carry any kind of modern identification such as a driver's license or Social Security card, and refuses to register for the draft. When a friend of his, who is a philosophical anarchist, is jailed, Burns deliberately gets himself arrested in an attempt to break his friend out of jail, but winds up on the run from the law himself. The film has a memorable fight sequence involving Douglas and one-armed actor Bill Raisch, who the following year began menacing David Janssen in the classic TV series The Fugitive.

The chase expands to Burns fleeing to Mexico. When a helicopter, a tiny civilian one that was labeled as supposedly being owned by the US Air Force, joins in the chase, Burns announces that he can shoot it down gently by knocking off the tail rotor (something which isn't practicable) so that he would not be depicted as a murderer. He does so with his rifle. The helicopter goes through a few gyrations and then goes offscreen.

Spoiler

The film has foreshadowing in that the seemingly extraneous progress of a tractor-trailer truck, driven by Carroll O'Connor (later the star of television's All in the Family) in one of his first film roles, is intercut with the story of the main characters. The chase ends a few feet from the border, with the truck colliding with Burns on his horse.

End Spoiler

Filmed in Albuquerque, New Mexico; the Sandia Mountains; and in the Tijeras Canyon, east of Albuquerque.

Kirk Douglas says that this is his favorite movie.

• Lonely are the Brave at the Internet Movie Database

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