Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Lusty Men
1952 · Nicholas Ray · The Lusty Men on Sightlines
A big man gets down on his hands and knees and crawls under a porch.
He has just limped out of a rodeo arena after everyone left: wide, flat, fenced, emptied of the event that gives it a purpose. Now he is at the house he grew up in, which stands abandoned, and he is on his belly in the dirt underneath it, feeling around for the things he hid there as a boy. He finds them. He holds them a moment. That is the scene.
Nicholas Ray opens The Lusty Men with a man who can no longer do the one thing he was good at, going to look for evidence that he was once somebody. Everything after it is organized by it. It is also why a rodeo programmer made at RKO in 1952, released under a title the studio imposed and everyone since has treated as a mismatch, turns out to be one of the stranger American films of its decade.
Here is the strangeness, stated plainly. In a Western, and in a sports picture, someone wants something and does something and the doing changes the situation. Deleuze called that arrangement the action-image, and it is the motor of nearly all classical Hollywood: a man wants a ranch, a man gets on a horse, the ride buys the ranch. Deleuze also argued that after the war this motor began to fail. Characters started appearing who could see their situation perfectly well and could no longer do anything adequate about it. He named that the crisis of the action-image, located it first in Europe, and dated the American version much later, to the sixties and seventies.
Jeff McCloud is that character in 1952, inside a Western, played by one of RKO's principal box-office assets.
He is injured, aging, broke. He cannot ride. So Ray hands the riding to Wes Merritt and keeps the camera on the man who watches. Deleuze's name for that figure is the seer, the voyant: a witness where the genre wants an agent, someone whose perception keeps running with no outlet into action. Mitchum plays him almost entirely in stillness, leaning on a fence, standing back of the chutes, reading somebody else's ride with the expertise of a body that can't perform it anymore. Deleuze's term for a face held immobile expressing one sustained quality rather than a reaction is the qualisign. Mitchum's is one for the length of the picture, a single unbroken register of knowing too much.
Why insist on this vocabulary? Because the usual praise for The Lusty Men (great melancholy character study, Mitchum's finest work) leaves the film's real oddity unexplained, and the oddity is structural, not tonal. By every classical measure Wes should be the protagonist. He wants, he rides, he wins. Ray puts the center of gravity on the one man who can only look, then builds the whole rhythm to match him. That is a rearrangement of what a movie is for, carried out inside a genre that exists to say the opposite.
The spaces follow. Deleuze's espace quelconque, the any-space-whatever, is a space that has stopped working as a stage for action: deserted, drained of coordinates, defined by what isn't happening in it. The opening arena is exactly that, an enormous machine for an event that has ended. From there Ray cuts to a crawlspace. Widest to lowest in two moves. Lee Garmes shoots both without underlining anything. The atmospheric low-key craft he had been refining since Shanghai Express twenty years earlier is spent here on dust, fence-slats and the dark under a house, mood doing the work that illustration would ruin.
Then there is what the film does with time. The phrase that keeps getting used about it is the dead time of the circuit, and that is Deleuze's phrase too: temps mort, the stretches where nothing advances and the everyday is simply held. Ralph Dawson's cutting runs two clocks. Rodeo action is cut for the jolt of the chute opening and the animal's violence; the dramatic scenes are held long and loose. Most pictures built that way use the slow scenes to load the fast ones. Ray inverts it. The few seconds of a ride exist to pay for the long hours of waiting in trailers and rented rooms, which is where the film actually lives. And the circuit itself is what Deleuze called the balade, the trip that transforms nothing: a route with no destination, where you travel constantly and arrive back at needing money. Louise's argument against it is that it's a loop pretending to be a road. She is right, and the film knows it before she says it.
Now, that title. Deleuze has an image-type sitting between feeling and action, the impulse-image: appetite showing through the social surface. He splits its world in two, the derived milieu (the concrete social setting) and the originary world underneath it, raw and violent and indifferent, and he says the trajectory between them runs downhill, a line of slope toward exhaustion. The Lusty Men has both layers built into its materials. The derived milieu is money: entry fees, purses, small change, the down payment on a ranch, who sits where in a crowded room. Ray stages it relentlessly. The originary world is the animal in the chute, and it arrives as documentary footage, real bulls and broncs and crowds, undramatized because it cannot be dramatized. Wes runs the slope, ambition curdling into recklessness and then vanity. RKO's lurid title accidentally names the layer Ray buried under the floorboards.
That documentary footage is also where the film touches a live argument in theory. Bazin held that cinema's authority comes from what was actually in front of the lens, and that when the essence of a scene depends on two things being present at once, cutting them apart is a lie. The Lusty Men cannot obey. No star could ride that stock. So the film has real danger in one shot and its star in the next, never in the same frame, and its whole technical achievement is matching grain, light and cutting rhythm until you stop noticing the seam. Ray did not invent the compromise. Body and Soul (1947) had cut actual fight footage into a money-versus-integrity melodrama, and The Set-Up (1949) had turned an arena's own sound, the PA and the crowd and the impacts, into the drama's engine, which is exactly what Ray reuses in the grandstand while Roy Webb's score stays plaintive, low, and refuses to inflate anything. Webb and Mitchum both reach Ray by way of Out of the Past, where RKO had already welded laconic minimal-gesture stillness to a fatalist score. Ray's move is to take that stillness out of doom and put it into watching. Ford's migrant camps in The Grapes of Wrath supply the other half of the grammar, the pared-down material world of trucks and tents, restated here as trailers and paddocks. And Ray had worked out the method himself in They Live by Night: an itinerant couple, scenes built from behavior and environment, the longing for a house kept under the plot instead of announced.
What it did to filmmaking runs forward on two lines. It was assembled with pages written close to shooting, character and scene shaped in progress rather than executed from a locked script, and that working method is what made Ray a hero to the Cahiers critics who were about to start directing. It also founded a template: the broken ex-champion who can't ride, documentary arena footage welded to staged drama, and the behind-the-chutes economy of entry fees, borrowed gear, injury as career arithmetic. The template is still load-bearing. Chloé Zhao's The Rider is built on it in 2018, down to the fence-and-chute register.
Watch it again and watch where Ray puts the camera during the rides. Not on the animal. On the man at the rail who isn't riding, doing the arithmetic. What McCloud pulled out from under that porch was proof, and the film's open question is what a man does with himself when all his proof is behind him.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — A Western and sports picture whose protagonist is an injured, retired champion who cannot ride: Ray gives the riding to Wes and keeps the film's center of gravity on the man who can only perceive, so the arena action never functions as the situation-transforming act the genre promises.
- the seer (voyant) — Mitchum's McCloud built from watchfulness and stillness rather than declamation, reading Wes's rides from behind the chutes with an expertise his body can no longer discharge.
- qualisign (icon of quality) — Garmes' camera holds and observes, letting Mitchum's immobile, weary face sustain a single quality of knowing across the picture instead of registering reactions.
- any-space-whatever (espace quelconque) — The opening: the wide, depopulated rodeo ground McCloud limps out of after the event has ended, then the low crawlspace under a derelict porch, two spaces defined by absence rather than by action.
- the gest — McCloud on his belly under the derelict porch of his childhood house, retrieving the small tokens he hid there, a posture that exposes his whole social position without a line of dialogue.
- dead time (temps mort) — Dawson's editing paces the dramatic passages slowly and repeatedly dwells on gesture, waiting and the dead time of the circuit, so the trailers and rented rooms outweigh the arena.
- voyage / balade form — The itinerant rodeo circuit as a route with no destination: constant travel between arenas and encampments that returns the Merritts to the same need for money, against Louise's demand for a fixed home.
- impulse-image — The studio-imposed title over a film whose real subject is appetite for money, glory and escape erupting beneath the sport's commercial surface.
- derived milieu — The film's acute consciousness of money staged through bodies in cramped spaces: prize purses, small change, the down payment on a ranch, who sits where and who owns what.
- originary world — Real bull rides, bronc busts and chute activity cut into the drama as undramatized animal violence, the savage layer beneath the trailers and entry fees.
- line of slope (entropy/degradation) — Wes's ascent into money and self-regard curdling into recklessness and vanity, the film's arc of moral erosion running downhill against Louise's resistance.