It's worth noting that Kirk Douglas long professed that Lonely Are the Brave contains one of his own favorite performances.

Such a shocking beginning is the first of many attributes that place this film as the best - and most atypical - western in which Jerry Goldsmith was involved throughout his professional career. [Full Review in Spanish]

Afterwards, [Kirk Douglas] made no mystery of his love of the film, later declaring it his all-time favorite of his work. And why not?

Lonely are the Brave, a film fairly stuffed with symbolism, shows how inevitably the heroic, human, in its real sense unsophisticated world of the West and its values are crushed by the synthetic, the mechanical, the wasteful and vicious in modern life.