One of the best rodeo films ever made, The Lusty Men is less a "man's film" than a melancholy and moving critique of masculine values. In his observation of a complex triangle involving a former rodeo champion (Robert Mitchum), his cowboy proteg?(Arthur Kennedy) and the cowboy's wife (Susan Hayward), Nicholas Ray casts two American prototypes-the itinerant outsider and the homesteader-against one another, with a third, the fifties housewife, caught in between. Typically of Ray, he finds the loneliness inhernt in each position: in Mitchum's time-limited machismo, in Kennedy's go-for-broke ambition, and in Hayward's conflicting desires for passion and peace, both thwarted by the urgencies of a man's world. (Mitchum: "That's a wife's profession...forgiving her husband." Hayward: "Men! I'd like to fry 'em all in deep fat.") The film is set against an authentic background that is vividly evoked by Lee Garmes' cinematography. Ray said, "I felt that it had a kind of poetry and a reality of human relations that was quite accurate, and also that rather accurately reflected not only a particular group of people, but a basic dream of most Americans, which is 'to own a home of my own'; that was the motivating factor of all these chaps in the rodeo."