'Have You Seen...?' by David Thomson

Author:David Thomson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141926582
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

The Lusty Men (1952)

Rodeo riders have their season and their eight seconds on a bull. They take their prize money while they can, and soon they are arthritic from their fractures, hobbling round the circuit, picking up beer money. Producer Jerry Wald had read this sad outline in a magazine story by Claude Stanush, and he put Stanush with David Dortort to furnish a movie treatment. What the fellows hit upon was one cowboy in decline, Jeff McCloud, teaching another on the way up, Wes Merritt. Dortort did a lot of research, and for a moment Robert Parrish was going to direct it at RKO. Then he fell away and Nick Ray was the director for hire, reveling in the research material and the chance to film the back roads of the West, country he had explored in his time as a folk-music researcher. Horace McCoy turned it into a shooting script, and Robert Mitchum and Arthur Kennedy were cast as Jeff and Wes.

It was then that Howard Hughes, interested in Susan Hayward, looked for a way to get her on his lot. Wes has a wife, he surmised—Susan Hayward—and she is drawn to Jeff. McCoy and Dortort did hasty revisions to accommodate this new angle, and Ray managed to get Lee Garmes to bring mood to the tatty, nomadic world of rodeo.

It all sounds like a routine project, yet a bond formed between Ray and Mitchum, no matter that the actor was bewildered by Ray’s introspective silences and his search for “motivation.” And Mitchum found himself as a loser, a man who has wasted too much time and broken too many bones and promises to himself. But in a funny way it’s the bourgeois drive of Susan Hayward’s wife, Louise, that is most interesting, struggling to make a stable world out of the gypsy life when Jeff prefers to believe that nothing is going to last. And the harder Wes tries to be a star, the more surely Jeff and Louise are drawn together in their rueful, common understanding.

The Lusty Men is not the best title it could have had, for the machoism in these guys is short-lived. Wald wanted a happier ending, where Mitchum goes off with an old girlfriend (Maria Hart), but Ray could taste the tragedy he had on his hands and he held to the scripted ending where Jeff gets a fatal injury trying to recapture his past.

After the studio shooting (with excellent art direction by Albert D’Agostino to show the trailer homes), they went traveling with the rodeo circuit. That’s when Ray and Garmes did some great scenes—the one where Mitchum goes back to his old family home (used in Wim Wenders’s Lightning over Water) and the melancholy shots of the rodeo ring at twilight with the wind stirring up dust and hot-dog wrappers. And that’s the secret to the film: for its conventional triangle story is brought to life by an eye like Walker Evans’s and the actors’ respect for the inner delusions of pipe dream.

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