The Lusty Men is less a "man's film" than a melancholy and moving critique of masculine values. Nicholas Ray, in his observation of a complex triangle involving a former rodeo champion (Robert Mitchum), his cowboy protegé (Arthur Kennedy), and the cowboy's wife (Susan Hayward), casts two American prototypes-the itinerant outsider and the homesteader-against one another, with a third, the fifties housewife, caught in between. Typically, Ray finds the loneliness inherent 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 rodeo background that is vividly evoked by Lee Garmes's cinematography. Ray said, "I felt that it had a kind of poetry and a reality of human relations that was quite accurate."