In 2007, a new movie will be released called The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, starring Brad Pitt as perhaps the most famous wild west outlaw of all time and Casey Affleck as the dirty little coward who shot him…or so the saying goes. One can hope this will be the definitive Jesse James biopic, but it’s got a few hard acts to follow and more than a few sad acts to follow.
Jesse James is prime material for moviemakers. Besides the fact that he is a criminal, a type that filmmakers can’t help but confuse with “complex” Jesse James also carries the substantial weight of the mythos of the western with him. (Remember, Jesse James was, for a brief time, Bobby Brady’s hero.) The period in which the history of the Wild West took place was unlike anything anywhere. People with weapons of instant destruction strapped to their waist walking around and effectively creating a country and economy while they did so. There was an element of lawlessness that almost made it seem as if the continent had been bifurcated into two distinct and only slightly related societies. Think about it. At the same time that guys criminals like Jesse James, Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp were strutting through dusty towns with revolvers openly displayed like some kind of modern black knights, Alexander Graham Bell was busy on the telephone, Mark Twain was writing Huck Finn and people who would one day get turned in characters in an Edith Wharton novel were busy destroying lives not with violence but with etiquette. Amazing. But I digress.
What I really want to write about is the movie history of Jesse James. Specifically the best and the worst. And we’ll start start with the worst.
Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter
Actually, this isn’t that bad. I mean at least it’s not supposed to be good which makes its awesome badness a bit more palatable. Sure it’s dumb, but it’s good goofy dumbness and as such, this one ranks far above…
Frank & Jesse
Featuring Rob Lowe as Jesse James. Need I say more?
Jesse James
This is the big one, starring Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda. This movie has a terrific reputation among many movie lovers and as pure fiction it’s a rather enjoyable old time western. But the plain truth is that Power is far too much a pretty boy to pull off a cold-blooded killer like Jesse James. The same goes for Fonda as Frank James; not that he’s too pretty, but he’s far too nice. It would take some years and mileage before Fonda had the acting chops to pull off a cold-blooded killer in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. I know it verges on heresy to put this one in alongside a Rob Lowe movie or a movie that puts Frankenstein and Jesse James into a plot blender and pulses for five seconds, but it’s really just not very good.
On the other hand, there are some very interesting Jesse James movies that have been made, including one certified masterpiece.
The True Story of Jesse James
Not long after making the strangest, most disturbing western of all time, Johnny Guitar, director Nicholas “Rebel Without a Cause” Ray decided he wanted to make the first non-fictional movie about Jesse James. Yes, I know, Robert Wagner is just as much as pretty boy as Tyrone Power-maybe even as much as Rob Lowe-but somehow he pulls it off. Yes, he manages to turn Jesse James into something more akin to Billy the Kid, but his portrayal of Jesse as one of Nick Ray’s patented causeless rebels really does work to a point. This movie could have been great, but apparently it was taken away from Ray for the final cut. As a result, it’s far from perfect, but it still manages to fascinate.
The Long Riders
This was the movie that utilized the gimmick of having real life brothers play fictional brothers. As a result, the Carradine brothers play the Younger brothers, the Keach brothers play the James brothers, Randy and Dennis Quaid play brothers and a very little-known Christopher Guest plays the brother of the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard. Despite this distraction, however, The Long Riders comes off quite well. Obviously, casting brothers increases your chances of uneven acting, but overall everybody comes off quite well. This is a dark western, to be sure, and incredibly violent. Borrowing heavily from the Sam Peckinpah approach to western shootouts, director Walter Hill lovingly slows down each bloody bullet exploding inside the human body. The movie is certainly deserving of its criticism that it attempts to infuse perhaps a little too much humanity into its outlaw characters, but that doesn’t lessen the fact that as both a cinematic lesson and a history lesson there is much to be admired here.
The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid
Until you can determine whether The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford exceeds it, this little flick remains the ultimate movie about Jesse James. Let me put it this way: Robert Duvall stars as Jesse James. Now I ask you, is that inspired casting or what? Duvall plays Jesse James as a man so consumed by the unfairness of his view of the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression that he becomes almost a religious zealot in which killing and robbing banks is transformed into payback for the iniquities visited upon the Confederacy. Cliff Robertson is almost equally good as Cole Younger, playing him as a sort of philosopher-killer. The movie is about the end of the James/Young gang and that end comes about in a particularly gray little town in Minnesota. This movie is gorgeously filmed, but what I mean by that it is that the cold, wintry weather reflects the cold, wintry hearts of its main characters. It has flaws, no doubt-the baseball sequence goes on just a touch too long-but the ending is brilliant, foreshadowing the appeal to necrophilia upon which modern day media is based. As you watch the townsfolk treatment of the corpses of the bank robbers you just may feel a tinge of humiliation at how long you kept the channel tuned to the non-stop coverage of the death of Anna Nicole Smith.
