With The Lusty Men, from RKO, director Nicholas Ray gave us a West in which the only way a cowhand can improve his lot is to bring his skills to the rodeo circuit, risking life and limb but possibly hitting the jackpot. The story could apply to race-car drivers or test pilots or any profession in which there’s a quest for highs outside the realm of usual experience. The West in The Lusty Men is a drab and dusty black-and-white expanse, not a place of colorful vistas or storybook ranches. The rodeo world has a tawdry showbiz aura, with the heightening drama of its potential for bodily harm. Like the booze, guns, and dance-hall gals of saloon westerns, the rodeo in The Lusty Men is an addiction. The main character, Robert Mitchum’s Jeff, says, “Some things you do just for the buzz you get out of it.” Here it’s awfully hard to turn one’s back on that buzz. But what makes this movie unusually adult is its three central characters, whose cross-purpose yearnings create a psychologically rich triptych of intense, festering desires and fears, both conscious and unconscious. Ray had already made They Live By Night (1949) and In a Lonely Place (1950), two overrated films held in higher esteem today than The Lusty Men; the former is marred by the malt-shop casting of its bruised leads and the latter is undermined by its weak second half. Flavorful Lusty Men easily bests them both.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
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