ma-cortes This is a slight and plain biopic about Jesse James who ranks with Billy the Kid as the most famous of Western outlaws . Legend and folklore have cast him as a Robin Hood , a good boy forced by circumstances to follow a criminal life . The picture provides a simple portrait of Jesse and his band , as they move from Civil War to there territory becoming into semi-legends . As showing his home life in Missouri, his experiences with Quantrill's raiders and his career of banditry . As Jesse (Robert Wagner) and Frank (Jeffrey Hunter) joined the Confederate guerrillas of Quantrill and learned to kill in ruthless company . Jesse and Frank along with cousins Cole (Alan Hale Jr) , Bob and Jim Younger (Biff Elliot) return from War to find mommy (Agnes Moorehead) and family threatened by Northern people . As detective Barney Remington (Alan Baxter) was hired by the railroad company to hunt down Jesse and Frank . So James Brothers commence to robbin' banks and trains to help out the poor folks who been done wrong . In the course of their revenge , they will become the object of the biggest manhunt in the history of the Old West . Along the way , Jesse courts attractive young , filly Zee (Hope Lange) . As their fame grows, so will the legend of their leader, a young outlaw by the name of Jesse James.This is a sprawling and glamorous Western with acceptable performances from Rober Wagner and Jeffrey Hunter. The film gets spectacular shoot em'up , thrills , exciting horse pursuits ; it's entertaining , although nothing new but displays an ordinary pace and with no originality . A glimmer Western with a wild bunch look-alike that ends up into a fateful final . Packs colorful scenarios, moving pace and slick edition by means of flashbacks .Footage from the original 1939 production was used when Frank and Jesse go over a cliff on horseback into a river and when they crashed, on horseback, through a store window during the "Northfield Minnesota Raid." Features various passable acting by a popular group of today's known stars . This is a decent look about the known story of the West's greatest bandit , Jesse James , along with Frank , Cole Younger and brothers with acceptable performances and professional direction by Nicholas Ray who creates some good action scenes . As originally conceived by Walter Newman and Nicholas Ray, the film had a non-linear plot with flashbacks, but studio boss Buddy Adler couldn't understand it and forced Ray to recut it with the scenes in chronological order ; Bernstein said the recut rendered the film "pointless." Taut excitement throughout , beautifully photographed by Joseph MacDonald and with spectacular bloodletting but realized with some flaws . Atmospheric and evocative musical score by Leigh Harline . The motion picture was well realized by Nicholas Ray who displays enough off-beat touches to keep . Other films about this legendary outlaw are : The classic version (1939) titled ¨Jesse James(1939)¨ with Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda, ¨The return of Frank james(1950) by Fritz Lang with Henry Fonda ; ¨I shot Jesse James¨ by Samuel Fuller with John Ireland as Bob Ford ; and ¨Jesse James vs the Dalton(1954)¨ by William Castle with John Ireland . And contemporary-style Western such as ¨Frank and Jesse¨ by Robert Boris with Rob Lowe as Jesse James , Bill Paxton as Frank James and Randy Travis as Younger ; ¨American outlaws¨ by Les Mayfield with Colin Farrell , Gabriel Macht , Terry O'Quinn , Harris Yulin and Ali Larter ; and ¨The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford¨ (2007) by Andrew Dominik with Brad Pitt , Sam Shepard , Mary Louise Parker , Casey Affleck and Sam Rockwell. The picture was based on actual events , these are the following : At the war's end in 1865 , Jesse rode in to surrender and was shot and seriously wounded by a Union soldier . It is believed that Jesse took part in his first robbery in 1866 when a dozen men held up the bank in Liberty , Missouri . A bank cashier was killed in the raid and a reward was offered for each of the James brothers . In 1873 Jesse and his band derailed and robbed a train on the Rock Island line . Jesse married his cousin Zerelda , who bore him two children . Pinkerton detectives were contracted to chase Jesse and Frank , the agents surrounded the home , believing they to be there , tossed a bomb and the explosion killed Jesse's young half-brother . This outrage brought much sympathy for the brothers . On 1876 Jesse and Frank in company the three Younger Brothers , attempted a bank robbery at Northfield , Minnnesota , and walked in disaster . The alerted citizens opened fire on the raiders , of the eight bandits involved , three were killed and three Younger brothers were captured . On 3 April 1882 Bob Ford , a new member of the gang , treacherously shot Jesse dead in back of the head in his home at St Joseph , Missouri .

funkyfry It's easy to see what the people at Fox were thinking when they put this movie together. They put Robert Wagner, an actor they were very interested in promoting, in a movie with director Nicholas Ray, who'd created a cinematic miracle of sorts with James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause" just a few years earlier. Perhaps they thought he could work magic with Wagner. They also put Jeffrey Hunter, another handsome young would-be star, in the film perhaps for insurance. And they had a story which was proved box-office, one of Tyrone Power's biggest commercial hits in Henry King's 1939 film. You can see how many scenes in this film evoke the memories of the audience from that film with the same images and iconography; if it wasn't for the odd qualities of the 1939 Technicolor process I would have suspected that a few scenes in this film were recycled from that one. But it's a more expensive type of film than that.Superficially, the story isn't more "true" than the 39 version. However, in this version the story is not told in a linear narrative. Rather, it begins with the James Gang's final holdup and tells much of the story through various flashbacks, then picks up the story again to show us its conclusion. Partly as a result of this, this version is less sympathetic to the James boys than the 1939 King version. In that one, it's kind of as if the film-makers were terrified of doing the slightest thing to make the audience dubious about Jesse James. This version doesn't exactly make him out to be a cold-blooded villain, but it doesn't really make him as much of a hero as the 39 either. Basically it shows that he was both. He perhaps started out with what he thought were good intentions. But he found that he enjoyed killing, and this particular film does make James out to be a bit of a sadist. He forgot what his purpose was in the first place. Ray managed to get good performances out of Hunter and Wagner for the scene in the cave where they confront each other. Notice how the other gang member is constantly shown up above listening to their conversation, but only interacts with Jesse after Frank leaves... a classic example of Nick Ray's use of triangulation.If Robert Wagner was just a bit more successfully emotive, this could be a better film. Still, he wasn't bad, and I thought Jeff Hunter managed just as well as Henry Fonda in the original film. The supporting cast is excellent, headed up by Hope Lange, Agnes Moorehead, plus tons of B movie/western regulars like Alan Hale Jr, Frank Gorshin, John Doucette, and for good measure John Carradine (who had played Bob Ford in the 1939 film).If someone *really* wants to buy into the whole "true story" aspect of this, then they're going to be disappointed. Likewise the people who are going to complain because maybe Wagner applies his pomade in a 50s style instead of an 1870s style. Whatever. I guess they're the same people who can't get past some of those strange or even surreal aspects of Nick Ray's greatest Western, "Johnny Guitar." Not to say this movie is anywhere near as good as that one, but it's no disgrace to Ray's reputation or any of the actors in the film either. It's a glossy entertainment package with some dark human reality buried just slightly beneath the surface -- hidden well enough so that anyone can see it, but only if they look. And like "Johnny Guitar", it shows us a West that still looks like Hollywood's West, but with Western "heroes" who aren't good or evil, but more than anything just plain tired. Looking for a place to hide out, to be "nice" as James says in Walter Newman's script. Perhaps "Jesse James" is more the movie Ray would have made for Republic if he focused on its world-weary male hero instead of becoming the bizarre (but unforgettable) diva-demolition derby that it became. John Carradine was in both of these movies as well... you just can't escape him when it comes to certain types of Western I guess, but who'd want to? The moment of James' death is indicative -- everyone has heard about it and everyone has seen it in other films, so instead of building up to it with music and drama like most versions, the stuff pretty much just happens really fast. And the letdown of that moment, that's something that's built into the whole movie. You can tell that Ray had seen Fuller's 1949 film about James, and this film feels like a strange hybrid between the King version and the Fuller version in a way. Not that he goes into the Bob Ford character or the aftermath in particular (he does use the same sort of image of a blind singer playing the "Coward Bob Ford" song), but it's like he's trying to allow the myth and the anti-myth to exist in the same film. The point isn't to keep us wondering whether Jesse James was a "good" guy or a "bad" guy, the point is to make that whole question pointless in and of itself. He was just a guy, he pretty much reacted to his circumstances not necessarily the way any other person would have, but the way that he would have, that his kind of man would. Largely gone is the 39 film's conceit that James would have liked to have simply settled down on a farm and been peaceful; Ray and Newman's James spits out the word "nice" to describe the life he imagines and dreams of as if he were a child trying to talk about sex, something in a totally different universe. He seduces Bob Ford with talk of the enjoyment of being in command, having power over others. His talk of a peaceful life is sincere, but unconvincing.

Ilya Mauter The True Story of Jesse James was the third Western directed by Nicholas Ray after fabulous Johnny Guitar and rather average Run for Cover. At the time director took the project he was at the peak of his prestige mainly due to an enormous success of the film he made prior to The True Story, which is Rebel Without a Cause. He was one of the highest paid directors in Hollywood at the time and the most beloved one by James Dean. Also he was one of the few directors who managed to get a certain independence from the Studio's control, an independence that was proven in making of Bigger Than Life, when his opinion won over the one by film's main star and producer James Mason. But with the True Story of Jesse James, those glorious days where over. It was the first Nick Ray's film where his artistic freedom was completely taken away by the producer and the studio, the first film where he didn't have the final word in making of it, and also the most hated one by the director himself, who later referenced to it in `F**g awful' terms, as being the film completely different from the one he was intending to do when took the project. One of the main points he mentioned later was the construction of the story in ill-achieved and ridiculous flashbacks, instead of which Ray wanted to move the story back and front several times without any explanation to the viewer, avoiding using the cliché flashback sequences with the narration by Jesse's mother and Zee, which were used in final version of the film, regardless of his opinion re-edited by the order of then Fox producer Buddy Adler, who found it difficult to understand the development of the story while seeing it in the director's cut. Also with The True Story that Ray obtained the reputation of the rebel, of a difficult person to work with and realized that his artistic freedom was quite limited. In the film we follow the true-life story of legendary James brothers, Jesse and Frank, played by Robert Wagner and Jeffrey Hunter, which starts with the ill-fated bank robbery that goes wrong and while the brothers are on the run from the authorities, the story moves back and tells as the 18 years of their lives prior to that, the circumstances which lead them to become the most famous outlaws in the history of the West, their successes and final separation which resulted in tragic end for Jesse and helped in moulding of Jesse James' figure as a legend of the West, the beginning of which is shown in the film's marvellous ending with the blind man singing the Jesse James song predicting so the future immortality destined to the hero. The True Story of Jesse James continues with the chain of rebel personalities so characteristic of the Nicholas Ray films with Robert Wagner as Jesse James following James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and John Derek in Run For Cover where the role of the characters' past in forming of their without a cause future is quite obvious. Ultimately it's one of those numerous films in Hollywood history, which probably could have been great, provided the director was given the opportunity to make it the way he wanted. 7/10

dinky-4 Not quite big enough to be an "A" movie, not quite small enough to qualify as a "B" movie, this version of the Jesse James story is too indecisive in its attitude toward its central character to have much impact. The Jesse depicted here is neither good nor bad, and the same thing could be said about the movie itself.It is a very good-looking movie, though it's completely out of touch with the times it's meant to portray. Every set, every costume, every hair-do says "Hollywood 1950s" rather than "Missouri 1870s."Robert Wagner seems too clean-cut to be a frontier outlaw but 20th Century-Fox was trying to push him toward stardom at the time, making use of his "hunk" appeal. He's thus given a few bare-chest scenes. Jeffrey Hunter, another would-be star, fits more easily into the western milieu as Jesse's brother, but his part has clearly been subordinated to keep the attention on the Jesse James character. One wonders how the movie might have been improved had these two actors exchanged roles.Agnes Moorehead and John Carradine lend interest to a better-than-average supporting cast.