The Lusty Men

Enjoy a special 2-for-1 double feature of Lightning Over Water and The Lusty Men on February 2! Present your Lighting Over Water ticket at the box office on Feb. 2 to redeem a free ticket for The Lusty Men. Subject to availability, no refunds for previously-purchased tickets.

Early in Wim Wenders and Nicholas Ray’s Lightning Over Water, one sees a long excerpt from The Lusty Men in which Robert Mitchum’s busted rodeo rider Jeff McCloud limps across a desolate landscape to the old shack where he was born. Wenders comments: “It’s more about coming home than anything I’ve seen.” Yet as Ray’s characters know all too well, the search for a home often keeps you on the road; in The Lusty Men, McCloud heads back out on the rodeo circuit with his hot-headed protégé Wes (Arthur Kennedy) and Wes’s loyal wife Laura (Susan Hayward). The unlikely trio set out to win the money for the couple to buy a farm and settle down, but are soon distracted by the thrill of the bronco ride and the growing attraction between McCloud and Laura. Juxtaposing documentary footage of real rodeos with elegiac black-and-white studio photography, The Lusty Men is a poignant record—at once melancholy and exhilarating—of a nomadic life of trailer camps, craps games, post-show benders, and 10 seconds of death-defying glory on the back of a wild bull.