Jesse James (1939) - film review

In the aftermath of the American Civil War, the St Louis Midland railroad company goes from strength to strength, buying up land as cheaply as possible by threatening and cajoling gullible landowners.  But when one of their employees, Barshee, tries to rob the James brothers of their land, the tables are turned.  Driven away at gunpoint by Jesse James, Barshee wastes no time arranging for arrest warrants to be drawn up.  With the James brothers in hiding, Barshee and his henchmen attack their home, unwittingly killing their old mother in the process.  Outraged by this unprovoked murder, Jesse and Frank James decide to become outlaws and begin a series of daring raids on trains and banks owned by the St Louis Midland company.  Prompted by Jesse’s wife Zee, Marshall Will Wright offers Jesse the promise of a lenient sentence if he will give himself up.  But when Jesse surrenders, he is thrown into jail and Wright’s promise is quickly forgotten.  Jesse is far from discouraged by this turn of events.  He knows that sooner or later his brother Frank will come to his rescue...

Jesse James was one of two legendary westerns released in 1939 which brought legitimacy to a genre which had largely become discredited in the 1930s, thanks to a slew of cheap and hackneyed productions from Hollywood’s poverty row studios.  John Ford’s Stagecoach made John Wayne an overnight star and established the style of what would become the classic Hollywood western.  Jesse James would have a similar, if not greater, impact and introduced audiences to another stalwart of the genre, Henry Fonda.  Shot in the recently invented Technicolor, this latter film has a striking modernity and remains one of the most beautifully photographed and poetic of all westerns.  

This was not the first or indeed last telling of the exploits of America’s most famous outlaw, but it is unquestionably the finest, its slick production values surpassed only by the remarkable performances from its lead actors.  Prior to this, Tyrone Power had been seen as a lightweight matinee idol.  His convincing portrayal of Jesse James, which combined old west machismo with genuine human frailty, was to alter audiences’ perception of him and helped to elevate him to the level of a screen icon.   Whilst Power is the star of the film, Henry Fonda gives the better performance, which is all the more remarkable for its quiet restraint and subtlety.   Strong supporting contributions from Randolph Scott, Nancy Kelly and Brian Donlevy help to make this one of the most compelling and realistic of Hollywood westerns.

When they embarked on this project, director Henry King and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson were keen to deliver the definitive account of the life and death of Jesse James, but both were more easily seduced by the myth than the reality.  When she viewed the film, Jesse James’s granddaughter remarked that she saw only one tenuous connection with the life of the famous outlaw – that it was about a man named Jesse who rode a horse.  The grim details of the James brothers’ notorious exploits is glossed over in the film and their criminality is justified as retribution against the capitalist demon that was driving hardworking American farmworkers to ruin.  This is the version of history that American audiences wanted to see, one in which their Robin Hood took on the moneygrubbing bankers and businessmen in defence of the values of the old west.  The film’s popularity encouraged Twentieth Century Fox to make a sequel, The Return of Frank James (1940), directed by Fritz Lang, with Henry Fonda reprising the role of Frank James.

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