CINEMATECA PORTUGUESA-MUSEU DO CINEMA

THE LUSTY MEN / 1952

A film by Nicholas Ray

The last film made by Nicholas Ray for R.K.O. (where, by that point everything was falling apart and, more or less, at the time when Howard Hughes decided to liquidate the firm in a financial operation that gave much to talk about), The Lusty Men was always one of the works that Nick loved most, one of the few permanences on the list of his favorite films.

In the year of his death, in 1979, The Lusty Men was the film he chose to be projected in the tribute screening at Vassar College, partially filmed by Wim Wenders in Lightning Over Water. And excerpts of this film appear in this final work, subtitled, as we know, Nick’s Movie.

The scene that we see in Wenders’ film is one of the initial scenes of The Lusty Men and one of the most beautiful (Nick Ray said one day that, if he had to keep only five minutes of everything he filmed, he would conserve these). Robert Mitchum has just given up the rodeo, after the initial fall. There is that fabulous plongé in which we see him, at the exit of “The Wildest Show on Earth”, between papers, old newspapers tossing in the wind, clouds of dust, with a sack on his back. Then, he hitches a ride in a truck, a very sweet tune starts to be heard and in one of those uncertain hours of which only Ray had the mystery (twilight? dawn?) dismounts and advances, in a long shot, framed by an enormous tree, towards an old and poor house, surrounded by some remains of wooden fencing. Mitchum perches on the fence, without any necessity of doing so, like someone who repeats a very old gesture, like someone who returns to an attitude of childhood (we will later know that he was born and raised in that house). A little later, he slips underneath the house and into a hiding place, only known by him, takes out a kid’s pistol, a book, a comic magazine and a sack where, for twenty years, he had saved two nickels. Everything was there, things don’t change much, “my folks lived here”. Twenty years, and nothing changed: “Some things never do”. And when the actual owner of the house asks him if he comes to stay, he answers that he doesn’t know, but that “I always thought I’d be back home again”.

In Wenders’ film, he tells Ray that that scene says more about what it means to come home than any other movie scene he had ever seen. And Nick responds: “I guess all of us didn’t have such a bad home. What does it mean to go back home anymore?… Pieces of warmth “some of us get it, some of us get a rifle up their asses”.

Did Mitchum, who thus returns home, find warmth or a rifle up his ass? It can sooner be said that the second of these happened to him, but during almost the whole film his dream was of such a warmth, this warmth he thought he found in the Merrills’ home, this warmth that Susan Hayward spends the whole film trying to preserve. But, like Nick said, “we can’t go home again”. The Lusty Men is the film about this impossible return, whether for Mitchum, or, in the end, for Wes and Louise, who also will never be able to return home (this home which they dreamt so much about buying) in the same way or at the same time.

We can conjecture that other themes have, premonitorily, attracted Nick. The Lusty Men is a film about a has-been, a side-car, Jeff McCloud by name, who tries desperately to convince himself that this image doesn’t fit him. “What were you trying to prove?” they ask him in the end, at the Pendelton rodeo, when he decides to ride again. Mitchum doesn’t answer, but when this astonishing character, played by the fabulous Hawksian actor that is Arthur Hunnicutt (by the way, notice that there are various references to Hawks in this film), says to him: “Everybody knows Wes ain’t in the same class with you”, he responds: “Everybody, but me.” And he also says he didn’t come back to the rodeo either because of Wes, or because of Louise, but “because of me”. And, in the end, before dying, what Susan Hayward says to him – in this scene of infinite love – is that he is exactly this loser, this guy who is no longer good for anything, if not for breaking bones and bottles. And what, throughout the film, was a sign of aggression between the two, becomes in this scene the sign of love, as if both finally understood that in this permanent reference to the past, to the impossible and uncontrollable, can the only and true greatness be discovered and found. For the first time (and for the last) Louise touches Mitchum’s naked and agonizing body. After the portentous kiss from before (at the end of the party, functioning as an exterior and interior sign) it is the only instance when physical closeness is possible, in one of the great erotic sequences in Ray’s work.

In an interview, Nicholas Ray, after a beautiful eulogy to Mitchum, adds: “the film continues to have a poetic quality and an approach to human relationships that I always found entirely accurate and each time believe to be even more so.” Essentially, it was what Rivette said, in other words, when the film premiered, writing that “solitude is the most just homage to modern society”. And there is no more beautiful film about solitude.

In The Lusty Men it is also said that there is no horse that can’t knock down a rider, no matter how good he may be (and that there is no dishonor in this) and that there is no rider that can’t tame a horse, no matter how wild it may be. I would not judge it to be inferring much to consider this “moral” as applicable to Ray, he too a tamer of many trials, and the most terrible ones, he too finally thrown to the ground. Perhaps this is also why, at the end of his life, he remembered this work so much.

I have been talking about horses and horsemen. But, inevitably, the comparison between horses and women arises many times throughout the work and Susan Hayward isn’t, certainly, the easiest of mounts that Robert Mitchum found in outside life. It can even be said that it is she who throws him to the ground, since she dresses in black and in that afternoon when her husband rides a horse called “Black Widow”. Rarely has an actress been such a woman in Ray’s work as Susan Hayward in this film: to her is owed Mitchum’s change in stature (from actor to professor, from rider to “manager”) and to her is owed Ray’s change in stature. Author and actor (both born under the sign of the Lion, as Alberto Vaz da Silva^[1] liked to point out) gaze with the same new gaze at his “aging” and at the woman who, in another way, simultaneously, is and is not his. Susan Hayward who at the age of nineteen went hungry, without money to buy silk stockings, chooses Wes, not for love, but because he can give her this home of which she is the ultimate and supreme guardian. For more than half of the film, she fights to conserve it and hence her rage towards Mitchum, in whom she senses, since the beginning, a threat (fabulous shot this, in which reflected on the car’s mirror, she watches the first meeting of her husband and Jeff). If the signs of restlessness go swelling (the no less fabulous shower sequence) it only explodes, in the end, at the barbecue dinner, when she adorns herself in black to interrupt her husband’s party. She hears, in silence, Mitchum’s stupefying declaration of love, keeping her feet planted in what she wanted to save. But, at the party, the ambiguity is total.

This is imparted in a succession of astonishing shots. When they get to the party where no one expected them, Mitchum and Hayward are surprised by the news of the marriage of Rosemary, Mitchum’s former lover. She asks her groom if she can kiss Mitchum, to which he submits with the ironic comment that these kisses are always the last. Meanwhile, Arthur Kennedy emerges from the depth of field with Babs, his face still full of lipstick. Susan Hayward advances to her husband, but the camera does a quick lateral pan and what remains in the frame is the kiss between Wes and Babs. The violence with which Susan Hayward then attacks Babs, the violence that, literally, drops over Babs (a violence that recalls In a Lonely Place), to whom is it directed? Despite appearances, it seems to be much more towards Mitchum than towards that insignificant little hooker^[2].

The sequence of the kiss and Mitchum’s blow to Kennedy follow. Then, Mitchum turns back to Susan Hayward and asks her: “You’re still sure?” There is an enormous silence and everything is consummated. The shot establishes “raccord” with the last rodeo, the rodeo of Mitchum’s death.

On the other hand, and as important as the Mitchum-Hayward relationship is, as always for Nicholas Ray, the friendship-love between Wes and Jeff. Never is Wes James the meek or mediocre “cuckold”. He loved Jeff long before his wife and it is dubious that his final jealousy is, likewise, more because of Louise than because of his friend. If Jeff is always the adult child (the first sequences also function to reveal the weight of childhood on him) Wes is an adult who wants to become a child. Mitchum plays with everything; Jeff^[3] would like to learn to play and isn’t able to. The explosion between the two is the accumulation of all these tensions. And, more than any conversation, this haunting succession of shot-reverse-shots speaks, in the end, when Kennedy realizes that Mitchum will mount the wildest horse. Or the incredible shot in which he says, when he sees him taming the animal: “He is the best.”

The Mitchum-Kennedy relationship is one more chapter in the relationship between two masculine protagonists with the ambiguity that it always had in Ray’s work. And like always in Ray’s work, both and also Susan Hayward are fugitives of the past, attracted by it, seeking to liberate themselves from it. Mitchum wants to forget the rodeo and that’s why he savors the peace in the Merrills’ home. But since he enters it he only provokes the fall of that home (his home), that is, the return to the rodeo, to the drinks, to the games^[4] and the encounter with death. And it was Nicholas Ray who underlined, in the last interview he gave (the one which we see a part of in Lightning Over Water), that The Lusty Men wasn’t a Western, but a “film about people who want a home of their own”. “To own a home of my own – and that’s what it’s all about”.

You’ll tell me, perhaps, that I’ve already written so much and still didn’t talk about the rodeos, which occupy about a third of the film. I will respond that I haven’t been talking about anything else. Is it necessary to say that they are prodigiously shot? They are and Nick Ray has always taken much pride in that. But, paraphrasing Godard in a famed critique of another Ray film^[5], it is certainly not this (truth or realism, if he prefers this footage) that matters most. What matters above all else is the other truth, the one which, like Godard said, blinds us as when we look at the Sun.

This truth that leads, in the end, the girl (Hunnicutt’s daughter) to open her mouth to make the movements that correspond to “I love you”, words directed to Mitchum which she cannot bring herself to articulate. Because this truth, in this Godardian sense, not only does not allow itself to be seen but also does not allow itself to be heard. As invisible as it is inaudible.