After Kirk Douglas read "The Brave Cowboy" by Edward Abbey, he purchased the rights to it and gave the project to his friend Dalton Trumbo. Douglas said Trumbo's screenplay was perfect, the best he had ever read, and he didn't change one word of it.
The one-armed man (Bill Raisch) tells John W. "Jack" Burns (Kirk Douglas) in the bar that he lost his arm at Okinawa during World War II. Raisch lost his right arm in a fire on-board a ship during that conflict. He was Burt Lancaster's stand-in, and later landed a recurring role, as the real killer of Dr. Richard Kimble's wife, on The Fugitive (1963).
President John F. Kennedy watched the movie in the White House in November 1962. In his memoir, "Conversations with Kennedy," Ben Bradlee wrote, "Jackie read off the list of what was available, and the President selected the one we had all unanimously voted against, a brutal, sadistic little Western called Lonely Are the Brave (1962)."
Not only does Kirk Douglas consider this his favorite picture, but his son Michael Douglas considers it his father's best work, too. Douglas also flouted convention, and caution, at the time, by performing his own stunts in the movie.
Edward Abbey's 1956 novel "The Brave Cowboy," on which this film was based, was set in the 1940's era of the military draft, and centered on the hero's friend, an anti-draft libertarian who goes to jail for defying the law that required men to register. In the screenplay, however, the character's "crime of principle" was changed to assisting illegal immigrants.