Jesse James

After reading Shot All to Hell, the account of the James Gang's attempt to rob the bank in Northfield, Minnesota, I figured I'd take a look at some Hollywood representations of Jesse James and his cohorts. I start with 1939's Jesse James, a technicolor film starring Tyrone Power as Jesse and Henry Fonda as Frank. It was a smash it, but it is a glorious whitewash of the truth, ludicrously anti-historical, and appears to have been written by James himself.

To start, the film begins with the James boys as simple farmers. No mention is made of their life in the Civil War as part of Quantrill's Raiders. Instead, they are defending their land against the unscrupulous railroad company, in the person of Brian Donlevy. When James shoots Donlevy in the hand, a warrant is sworn out for him, and in the attempt at capture, Donlevy tosses a grenade into the house, killing their mother (Jane Darwell). Okay, here's the truth: James' mother was wounded in an attack (she lost an arm) but it was in a raid by Pinkerton agents, because James was already a bank robber.

There are long stretches of the film that are completely fictional, such as when Jesse turns himself in and then Frank breaks him out of jail. The script indicates that they hit only the railroad that killed their mother, justifying their actions. It is true that Missouri media, mostly an editor named John Newman Edwards, built up the James' reputations as modern-day Robin Hoods. Here he's represented by the Major, played comically by Henry Hull.

The raid at Northfield is also shown, but the disaster is chalked up to Robert Ford tipping off the authorities, which of course was not true, as Ford wasn't even at that robbery. Later, James will be assassinated by Ford right before he's ready to give up the bandit life and head to California, another untruth.

The film, even without all these inaccuracies, is kind of sluggish, bogged down by a romance between Jesse and Nancy Kelly. Power also wasn't much of an actor, frankly, and Fonda is much more interesting as the older brother.

This film was also notable for being the last made before the American Humane Society stepped in to supervise filming involving animals. In a spectacular stunt involving the James boys riding horses over a cliff, one horse was killed. No film is worth the death of a horse, least of all one that can't get hardly a fact right.