When Robert Mitchum’s Jeff McCloud declared “Guys like me last forever” in Nicholas Ray’s Depression-haunted contemporary Western The Lusty Men (1952), it was hardly the first time one of Ray’s characters found a way to express a sentiment that felt like it came straight from the director’s guts as a response to his many personal demons. As was often the case with Ray, the sentiment’s origins weren’t necessarily in the original script. Ray’s work covering reshoots on the troubled production of Josef von Sternberg’s Macao put him in the good graces of RKO head Howard Hughes, and he threw himself into the project that was originally titled Cowpoke full-heartedly, and with plenty of creative control after it was decided that it would be him directing this project. (John Huston, Raoul Walsh, and Anthony Mann had previously declined, and the little-known Robert Parrish was both the originally planned director and someone who shot a small amount of material when Ray was taken ill during shooting.) Ray’s bond with his actors on this film was powerful but oblique: he and Mitchum frequently collaborated to both help the latter find the background for the character and improvise new lines in a way that brought out the emotional truths of the story (which wasn’t even a finished script due to the needs of the shooting schedule), but it also resulted in plenty of Ray staring mutely at the actors from his chair, waiting for a moment that spoke to him. Mitchum and Arthur Kennedy both claimed that while they agreed with everything Ray said, they didn’t entirely understand most of it. Mitchum ultimately considered the film one of the best things he ever did, and Jeff McCloud is one of the finest showcases for the volcanic emotions that could emerge from beneath his taciturn drawl. (He also claimed that when the studio forced them to shoot a happier ending, he got his secretary to steal the reel and throw it in an incinerator.) Nobody involved with the film particularly liked the new title that Hughes imposed on them and felt that it could have made more money if it hadn’t been marketed misleadingly, but that was the only real sore point. And it still did respectable box office business — the audience was surprisingly receptive to a film with so many forlorn and suicidal qualities.
Ray had spent three years working with the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal era, and had seen just how many of the cowboys he’d met across the American West wanted to earn enough money to buy a piece of land for their own home. The contradiction of cowboys wanting some kind of security was a perfect dilemma for Ray’s unstable melodramas. The contradictions come right at the start when the film opens with the first of many documentary sequences depicting a parade, but then transitions into our all-fiction introduction to Jeff McCloud, an aging rodeo competitor. He quits the circuit after being injured by a bull he was riding, but when he returns to his childhood home all he finds are buried boyhood trinkets and an older man who points a shotgun at him. Wim Wenders cited McCloud’s return as the finest scene about homecoming he knew of, and it’s the foundation for his introduction to Wes and Louise Merritt, played by Arthur Kennedy at his most ambivalent and Susan Hayward in one of her last showcases of restraint before the desire to win an Oscar fully got hold of her. (How we’re supposed to analyze their surname is left as an exercise for the reader.) The Merritts want to earn enough money in rodeos to buy Jeff’s old home, but Wes is an amateur and needs help. Jeff agrees to serve as his trainer in exchange for half the earnings, and we’re off to the games. Wes becomes an instant success, but begins developing a fondness for alcohol and women: it makes Louise uneasy enough to seek comfort with Jeff, and bears more than a little resemblance to the infamous disaster of Ray’s marriage to Gloria Grahame. The couple was finalizing their divorce that same year, and the well-known revelations about Grahame sleeping with Ray’s 13-year-old son Tony (who she subsequently married), and Ray’s subsequent downward spiral, bear an eerie resemblance to the mentor-“protégé” dynamic found in The Lusty Men. (One small wrinkle is that Kennedy was actually older than Mitchum.)
Ray called The Lusty Men “more documentary than most documentaries,” and the film spends a fairly sizable amount of time watching real-life rodeo performances with the color commentary attached, delivering decidedly unstaged bull gorings and camera smashes. It’s certainly one of the closest Hollywood studio films to resembling docufiction when we’re at the rodeo, but the sad lives when we head back to the trailer park are every bit as tempestuous as the bulls, despite a far greater sense of restraint: they’re all bearing the weight of this sad world alone, chasing high adrenaline despite the risks, and stuck in an era that doesn’t really know what to do with cowboys anymore. Women like Louise might be happy for the reduced risks, but there’s nothing they can do about the men feeling forever displaced, and when Wes eventually gets fed up with Jeff taking half the prize money, that’s Jeff’s cue for one last wild-man gesture when he returns to the rodeo for a final shot at glory. He achieves it, and then loses it via his foot getting stuck in a stirrup, and when he dies in Louise’s arms, it hardly seems worth it that Wes finally quits the scene as a result. By the time a Nicholas Ray film is finished, all the emotional instability is past memories, but those are the very thing that haunts us the most and shapes all our future actions. They may be leaving the rodeo scene behind, but all those kicking animals have left their wounds in both the body and the mind — it’s just a matter of whether they want to flaunt their battle scars.
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