Nicholas Ray and Robert Parrish | The Lusty Men / 1952

being scared

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Dortort, Alfred Hayes, Horace McCoy, Andrew Solt, and Jerry Wald (screenplay, based on a novel by Claude Stamush), Nicholas Ray and Robert Parrish (directors) The Lusty Men / 1952

 

You have to forgive this film for its utterly inappropriate title, The Lusty Men—it might as well have been titled The Randy Cowboys. Clearly, one or more of its numerous writers tossed out the title to attract a prurient interest, or some studio head demanded a “sexier” come-on. But, fortunately, it has nothing to do with Nicholas Ray’s sensitive portrayal of rodeo performers and their addictions to that self-destructive sport. Despite sometimes tense male-to-male relationships and both central characters’ love for the film’s central female character, played by Susan Hayward, there is nothing even slightly “lusty” about their acts, particularly of a heterosexual nature.

     Injured by a Brahma bull he attempts to ride, veteran rodeo rider Jeff McCloud (Robert Mitchum) decides to retire, returning to his childhood home, a now crumbling, run-down place owned by Jeremiah (Burt Mustin). The place, however, would be perfect for a local couple, Wes and Louise Merrit (Arthur Kennedy and Hayward), who attempt to save money to buy it from Wes’s meager earnings as a cowhand.

      Hired to work at the same ranch, Jeff attracts the attention of Wes, who, without telling his wife, is determined to enter a local rodeo. When he does well, he is convinced to join the rodeo circuit with Jeff as his trainer-partner—over the serious objections of his wife. Since he can make far more at a single rodeo that he can save from his own annual wages, he stakes his chances on riding, insistent that we will pull out the moment he makes enough money to buy the derelict farm. As he tells Jeff, who is a kind of worn-out, slightly cynical philosopher throughout the film:

 

                        Wes: A fella’s bankroll could get fat in a hurry, rodeoin’.

                        Jeff: Bahh… Chicken today, feathers tomorrow.

                        Wes: Now if he played it smart when he had the chicken.

 

       As a rodeo wife, however, Louise begins to perceive the other side of “rodeoing” as she meets former friends of Jeff, such as Booker Davis (Arthur Hunnicutt), who, once a champion, is a now crippled old man.

 

                         Jeff: Old Book used to be one of the best bronc riders in the

                                  business.

                         Wes: What happened?

                         Jeff: Punchy. Bronc shook his brains loose. He’s head wrangler

                                 for Dawson now.   

    When another competitor, Buster Burgess (Walter McCoy) is killed by a bull, he leaves behind a bitter wife, Grace (Lorna Thayer). Depressed by what she has observed, Louise decides to stay away from the rodeo activities, allowing another woman, Babs (Eleanor Todd) to move in on her husband. When he is invited to a party Babs is throwing, Louise attends the affair, pouring a drink over her rival’s head.

       Meanwhile Jeff warms up to Louise, at one point, when she has been offered the possibility to take a shower in Rosemary Burgess’ trailer, comically encountering a suddenly jealous friend:

 

                     Buster: (entering Rosemary’s trailer to find Jeff sitting inside. The

                        water can be heard running in the background). Who’s in the shower?

                     Jeff: Lady.

                     Louise: (from the shower) Jeff, can you hand me a towel?

                     Buster: (Jeff starts to get up but Buster stops him) I’ll get it.

                        (He walks in on Louis in the shower and she screams.) That

                        ain’t Rosemary!

                     Jeff: Nooooooo.

 

     But when Jeff attempts to suggest a relationship with Louise, she remains true to Wes. His answer represents the kind of witty, understated dialogue behind much of Mitchum’s acting and reveals Ray’s brilliant manipulation of his characters:

 

                     Jeff: (to Louise) I do think I ought to kiss you just once, though, for all

                              the times I won’t.

 

       Throughout, Jeff has represented riding as an act that requires respect, arguing for a healthy fear for what they do, presenting the idea, once again, in his philosophy of alternatives:

 

                     Jeff: I’ve been scared, I’ve been not scared.”

      But as Wes continues winning, having now won more than enough to buy the house, he loses the necessary “being scared” about his profession, lashing out against his partner for his often skeptical comments and for taking part of the money based on Wes’s own feats. When the two part ways, Jeff determines to go back to “rodeoin” even though he is clearly now out of shape.

      In the first two events, roping and riding, he does well. But in the bronc riding contest his foot becomes caught in the stirrup after he has brilliantly ridden the horse, and he is killed, demonstrating to the hard-headed Wes, just how dangerous the business is. Wes quits the rodeo circuit, returning home with his loving wife.

     Anyone who has seen this film, although they might certainly recognize that I have been quite truthful to the plot and sometimes even the “feeling” of the film, will realize that there is also something missing in my description. Although it’s clear, at least in the beginning that Wes loves his wife, he also does he love Jeff, or at least for what he stands for. And if it’s true what Jeff keeps trying to instill in Wes’ resistant mind that no one comes truly away from rodeo life truly as a winner, Wes loves the masculine comradery more, perhaps, that the heteronormative life which he has been living.

      As Leonard Quart’s intelligent review in Cineaste in 2015 points out, “Ray’s deepest sympathies are for outsiders, not for those who choose domesticity.” And even if Wes, while winning, also recognizes things might easily turn on him, as it has for Jeff, he, like the director himself, “is sympathetic to the men, who revel in the applause of the crowd and are willing to risk their lives for small rewards. His heart goes out to those who wander endlessly, like Jeff, who love the rodeo life. Jeff has his flaws, but he conveys a touch of nobility—more so than any of the other

characters in the film;” and even after their break and Jeff’s death, Wes continues to reaffirm his homoerotic love of his mentor: “He was the best,” something he surely might never declare about his fretful wife.

      1952, given the still deeply enforced Film Production guidelines, moreover, was still a long way to 1955—when Ray could feel somewhat freer through the characters of the teenagers of Rebel without a Cause to challenge societal normality and even its ideas about sexuality—to go any further with the deep homoerotic relationship between Wes and Jeff would have been impossible. As it was, the studio, so Quat reports, “pushed for a Hollywood-style sentimental finish with Jeff surviving and going off into the sunset with an ex-girlfriend,” to which Ray refused.

     Wes does return to farming and his domestic relationship, but Ray makes it quite clear that “Louise and Wes have chosen a more secure and tedious, but less autonomous and adventurous life. From Ray’s perspective, nobody wins in a film where one feels a gloomy fatalism underlying all the action. The Lusty Men is a small, poetic film with an emotional resonance that goes beyond its bare narrative.”

     And we know that the rest of Wes’ life will never be able to match the tales he will tell anyone who will listen about the appearance out of nowhere of the great rodeo hero Jeff and his own great days in the saddle. Those same stories, alas, will be Louise’s punishment for not only also having fallen in love with Jeff, but for drawing her husband back into the heteronormative society which could never have permitted either of their seemingly momentary manias.

     If these men are indeed “lusty,” both for other women and perhaps for their male compatriots, it is a sin only of the mind. Life in 1952 was intentionally delimited, closed off, and bleak when it came to changes and difference.

      

Los Angeles, September 26, 2012, revised August 15, 2024

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (September 2012).