Question: Build a movie plot around this: who served in the military? Jack Burns
Answer:
The movie opens with modern day cowboy Jack Burns (Kirk Douglas) stretched out beside a dying campfire at dawn, awakened by the roar of fighter jets above the vast, open scrublands of New Mexico. Burns is a cowboy ill at ease with the modern world of the early 1960s. He rolls his own smokes and cuts through fences when they block his path. He carries no ID, not even the requisite draft card. He is on a collision course with the world around him. His only constant companionship comes from Whiskey, his spirited and beloved buckskin mare.Burns rides into Duke City, New Mexico, crossing a busy highway atop his spooked horse and nearly getting killed in the process. He surprises Jerry Bondi (Gena Rowlands), the wife of his best friend, in her kitchen. Her husband Paul (Michael Kane) is in jail, having been sentenced to two years in prison for helping Mexican immigrants cross into the United States illegally. Burns wants to go see him, but Jerry explains that the next visiting opportunity is several days off. Burns divulges that he has been forced to herd sheep just to earn a living. He says he started for Duke City as soon as he learned of Paul's plight.Meanwhile, a long-distance truck driver (Carroll O'Connor) exits a diner in Joplin, Missouri and climbs into the cab of his vehicle, headed for Duke City. He is hauling a load of porcelain toilets in his tractor-trailer.Burns plans to go into town, get drunk, and somehow get thrown in jail in order to see his friend. He finds a Mexican bar and heads for a back table with his beer and a whiskey chaser. On the way to his table, he trips over the intentionally outstretched foot of a one-armed man (Bill Raisch). Burns starts to complain, then notices the man's missing arm and apologizes. Burns sits down, drains a glass of whiskey, and starts nursing his beer, but the one-armed man suddenly throws a whiskey bottle across the room, smashing it against Burns' table. Burns calmly tells the man to watch himself and returns to his beer. The man then throws his whiskey glass...