Lonely are the Brave (1962)

Kirk Douglas plays a cowboy who still lives by horse and open range in a New Mexico now crossed by fences and highways, and the sheriff chasing him, played by Walter Matthau, brings jeeps and a helicopter. That mismatch is the whole film, and it lands harder than any speech about the passing of the West. Dalton Trumbo adapted Edward Abbey's novel The Brave Cowboy, and Douglas later called it his favorite of his own films. Shot in black and white on location, it is the purest statement of the neo-western's central idea: a man built for an older country with nowhere left to ride.