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Tyrone Power sports a matched pair of six-shooters in shoulder holsters in Twentieth Century Fox's glamorous but historically challenged biography "Jesse James" (1939) with a lanky, mustached Henry Fonda co-starring as Jesse's older brother Frank. This was the first major Technicolored saga of America's most notorious train robber Jesse James since 1927 when director Lloyd Ingraham helmed the silent, black & white "Jesse James" for Paramount Pictures. In any case, "Lloyd's of London" director Henry King gives this horse opera all the 'pop' it requires in terms of action, while future "Dirty Dozen" scenarist Nunnally Johnson supplies the proper amount of corn.
Twentieth Century Fox studio mogul Darryl F. Zanuck loaded this 106 minute epic with contract talent that graced all the blockbuster Fox films. John Carradine solidified his credentials as an evil incarnate with his portrayal of the treacherous Bob Ford who later shoots Jesse in the back. Carradine later became one of America's foremost horror actors. He resembles Satan. Ironically, Charles Middleton, who played 'Ming the Merciless' in the "Flash Gordon" serials, has a walk-on as a kindly country sawbones. Durable Randolph Scott who plays a sheriff that warns Jesse that when they meet again, they'll be blazing away at each other with their pistols. Ironically, Scott never brandishes his six-gun. "High Sierra" character actor Henry Hull steals every scene that he has as cantankerous old newspaper publisher Major Rufus Cobb. Hull is hilarious when he launches into a tirade against some perceived evil and dictates an editorial to his typesetter. At one point, the Major blames lawyers for corrupting mankind. "If we are ever going to have law and order in the West, the first thing we gotta do is take out all the lawyers and shoot'em down like dogs!" Priceless moments like these relieve "Jesse James" of the oppressive gloom and doom that hovers over the protagonist's head.
"Jesse James" takes place in post-Civil War America during the railroad building boom. Anybody that has seen any of the other movies about Jesse James knows he rode with renegade Confederate Colonel William Quantrill and his raiders. The first time we see Jesse (Tyrone Power of "In Old Chicago"); he is unarmed, clearing underbrush with a scythe. Barshee (Bryan Donlevy of "Destry") and a group of railroad troubleshooters descend on poor, defenseless homeowners and coerce them into selling their acreage for one to two dollars an acre. They warn those refusing to sell that the government will simply condemn their land and then confiscate it for nothing. Barshee's strategy fails him when he ventures onto the homestead of Mrs. Samuels (Jane Darnell of "The Grapes of Wrath"), the mother of Jesse and Frank James. Frank and Barshee brawl. When Frank isn't watching the 'tricky' Barshee, the railroad man seizes a scythe to slash him, but Jesse wounds him in the hand.
Barshee and his bunch skedaddle back to town and convince the sheriff to deputize them. Barshee and company ride out after Jesse. Meanwhile, Jesse lights out after he has called a meeting with his fellow landowners to plot strategy against the railroad. In a sense, Jesse emerges briefly as an agitator against the forces of big business. Things worsen when Barshee returns to the James farm and hurls a bomb into the James house. Mrs. Samuels dies. Jesse and his brother Frank assemble a gang and terrorize the St. Louis Midland Railroad. The president McCoy (tyke-sized Donald Meek) who wants to see Jesse hang for his harassing his railroad and passengers will stop at nothing. Jesse and his gang rob the Midland train and the passengers. At the same, time Zerelda Cobb (Oscar nominated Nancy Kelly of "The Bad Seed") marries Jesse while they are on the lam in a church by a reverend who had to give up working a real job to preach after Barshee's men legally stole his homestead.
This Twentieth Century Fox tent pole epic sanitizes the train robber's image. Matinée idol Tyrone Power was Fox's answer to Warner Brothers' Errol Flynn. Indeed, Power is a far cry from the psychotic Jesse James that Robert Duvall played in "The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid." Nevertheless, by 1939 standards of 1939, "Jesse James" constituted a terrific shoot'em up. King stages a dramatic showdown in a bar between Jesse and Barshee. King handles the complicated Northfield, Minnesota, raid with verve, especially when the James boys crash their horses through a storefront window to escape a withering fusillade from townspeople that had been laying in wait for their arrival. The on-location shooting bolsters authenticity. Watch the scene where Jesse charges hell-bent-for-leather between the railroad tracks and the horse misses a step between the cross-ties but quickly recovers. Our protagonists escape the Northfield posse in classic "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" fashion when they plunge their horses off a cliff into a river and swim to safety. The turning point occurs when Zee has her baby son but Jesse isn't around to watch her give birth. Zee demands that Major Cole take her back to Liberty.
Johnson does a superb job of foreshadowing events in "Jesse James." Zee realizes not long after Jesse turns outlaw that his life will be cursed and their relationship breaks down because Jesse worries so much about the law that he spends more time away from Zee than with her. The greatest example of foreshadowing occurs near the end when Jesse hastens outside to his son's side during a pretend game of outlaws where Jesse, Jr., (John Russell) impersonates his dadunbeknownst to everybody that Mr. Howard is really Jesseand we know that Jesse's death is imminent. The children shoot Jesse, Jr., with their wooden guns and he dies before his stunned father who decides to hang up his gun and take his family to California where they will live as law-abiding citizens. Ultimately, King and Johnson concede in the last scene that Jesse James was an 'outlaw, bandit, and criminal.'
score 10/10
zardoz-13 13 September 2008
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1945397/ |
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31-3-2021 00:06:13