Exciting Story of Western Outlaw.

rmax304823

Henry Hull, as a newspaper publisher and Jesse's friend, is giving the speech at Jesse James' burial. "We're PROUD of Jesse around here," he shouts. "I reckon all America's a little proud of him. I dunno why. Maybe it's because he was bold -- and lawless -- the way we all like to be, once in a while." Nothing like being bold and lawless. The middle-class James family in Clay County, Missouri, were slave owners and Jesse fought on the side of guerrillas who were sometimes lawless even by Civil War standards. After the war, Jesse was wounded while trying to surrender, and thereafter lawlessness became a career. He was more or less turned into a Robin Hood by a newspaper editor in Kansas who had fantasies of restoring the Confederacy.

But that's all history and history is all conjecture. Any pretense towards factuality in this movie can be easily shrugged off and a viewer can sit back and enjoy a bang-pow Western full of well-crafted scenes of shooting and galloping horses and drama about loyalty and love.

Some scenes are positively comic. During the hold up of a train, Bob Ford (John Carradine) walks down the aisle collecting cash from the terrified passengers. "Thank you! Thank you kindly, sir. Hurry, please. That's a fine pocket watch, sir." And there is an engaging meeting between Randolph Scott as the lawman in Liberty, Missouri, and Tyrone Power as the skedaddling Jesse, in which Scott intuits Jesse's real identity but pretends not to know it.

Some of the shots are spectacular -- twice, a horse and its rider slide off a cliff into a river, tumbling over every which way, a distance like unto that dropped by Paul Newman and Robert Redford in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." Tyrone Power is as handsome as Newman or Redford. Randolph Scott is manly, honest, and wise. Henry Fonda, as Jesse's brother Frank, is taciturn, spits tobacco, and acts like The Man With No Name. Henry Hull, as the cantankerous newspaper editor, paraphrases Shakespeare to amusing effect, "If we are ever going' to have law and order in this town, the first thing we got to do is take all the lawyers and shoot 'em down like dogs." The movie was shot in splendid Technicolor on location in Jesse James' country.

The sentiment with which the film ends is stupid. We all want to be like Jesse James. Right -- we all want to carry guns and shoot people we don't like, or just strangers who get in our way. But the protagonist of this story isn't Jesse James. It's Tyrone Power acting out a revenge motive and he's fundamentally a good guy, so we can afford to applaud him because the character doesn't exist. Let's cheer for Robin Hood too, while we're at it.

score 6/10

rmax304823 2 August 2007

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1704749/