Kirk Douglas once named his most overlooked movie: “They didn’t give it a chance”

Posted On February 27, 2025February 27, 2025

While Spartacus is arguably the most iconic movie in the filmography of Kirk Douglas, it’s not the picture the legendary star counted as his favourite. Interestingly, that honour belongs to a little-seen film that was released only two years after Kubrick’s Ancient Rome epic but received barely a fraction of the fanfare. Douglas felt the studio mismanaged the film and failed to give it the best platform for success – and it would take decades for the movie to finally be embraced as the classic he always knew it was.

The story of this overlooked classic began when Douglas read a 1956 novel entitled The Brave Cowboy. It was written by Edward Abbey, a man who only wrote eight novels throughout his whole career. Douglas was captivated by the story of a man who refuses to join modern society, instead preferring to live his life as a transient worker and itinerant ranch hand, like the cowboys of old. It spoke to Douglas on a deep level, and he explained, “It happens to be a point of view I love. This is what attracted me to the story – the difficulty of being an individual today.”

Douglas set about assembling a team to turn The Brave Cowboy into a motion picture. He hired Spartacus screenwriter Dalton Trumbo to write the script, and he later said that he found his adaptation so perfect that he didn’t change a word. He put together the cast and crew from his production company, Joel Productions, and the film was shot in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This part of the process ran fairly smoothly – but the problems began as soon as it came time to talk with the studio about releasing the movie.

For starters, Douglas and Universal Pictures were at loggerheads about the title. “The book was called The Brave Cowboy, and I didn’t want that title,” Douglas told a 50th-anniversary audience at the Egyptian Theatre in 2012. “I wanted to call it The Last Cowboy, but the studio – which had the money – insisted on Lonely are the Brave. And I said, ‘What the hell does that mean?’”

Even worse, though, was Universal’s distribution plan for the movie. Douglas knew this picture was quieter and more introspective than most westerns so he favoured a slow and steady approach that put the movie in arthouse theatres before eventually expanding to a wide release. Universal, on the other hand, wanted to market the movie as a traditional rootin’ tootin’ western and throw the picture into as many theatres as possible without taking any time to build an audience.

In James Bawden and Ron Miller’s Conversations with Classic Film Stars, Douglas insisted, “You need the proper selling of a picture like that. I thought Universal just threw it away. They didn’t give it a chance.” No sooner had the movie arrived in cinemas than it was removed from circulation because of poor ticket sales. Then, when hugely positive reviews began to filter out in the press, Douglas recalled people asking him, “Where’s the picture?” Frustratingly, by the time people wanted to see the movie, it wasn’t available to them.

All in all, Douglas was adamant that the ego of the executives at Universal had “prevented them from making a different campaign for the picture.” He always held a candle for Lonely are the Brave, though, and was gratified when it was reevaluated in the decades after its release as one of the best westerns ever made.

It wasn’t an easy path, though, and the icon grumbled, “The longer I’m in this business, the more amazed I am that a movie can be made, good or bad.”

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