Fresh and Exciting

Captivating movie !

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The first thing that jumps to mind upon seeing this film (the color version, which, to my good fortune, was also in High Definition) is that it is beautiful. The cinematography is absolutely sparkling, with scenes such as the iconic Railways Launch or the one where Zee approaches a cave to meet Jesse stuck in memory despite the film coming from 80 years ago. The night photography is also brilliant, and the scenes where the Gang meets (in shacks lit by a dim light, musty and suspended in shadows) boast of a brilliant man behind the camera.The plot is superb - I'm not sure about historical accuracy, but as the film weaves through a conclusion, then a new beginning, then another conclusion, and a new beginning, and then *the* conclusion, the plot holds it tightly together, without making it drag at any point in time. The writing is brilliant, with the dialogue shining in every scene - special props for the dialogue of the senile Major (the Uncle) who enjoys ranting, and whose rants we enjoy in turn.The acting is first-class, as is the characterization - Frank is a standout, being masterfully portrayed by a slick, suave Henry Fonda, and his lines and actions are the most understated in this film. Tyrone Power plays Jesse with a beautiful firmness, portraying both his unthinking ruthlessness (without descending into Nicolas Cage-ish histrionics) and his conflicted desires with painful accuracy. Finally, Nancy Kelly (who looks incredible here) plays Zee with pathos (her anguish when her son is born) and with just the right amount of spunk, so as to not look like a stereotypical "strong female character". All the other actors deserve equal mention, but let me summarize - the performances in this film are brilliant.In addition, let me state that there cannot be any spoilers as to the ending of this film - in fact, knowledge of how it ends made the penultimate scene take me as close to nail-biting as I've ever gotten, and every moment it was tension, tension, tension - superb!To put it short, this is one heck of a film, and not just that - it's one of the doggonedest, gawl-dingedest, dad-blamedest films I've seen in a long time.

There are certain similarities between "Jesse James" and "They Died with Their Boots On", another Western from two years later. Both films are loosely based on the life of a legendary hero of the Old West, James here and General Custer in the supporting film. (At least, the films treat their subjects as heroes; whether either man really deserves that title is another matter). Both feature a famously handsome and dashing star in the leading role. Both are notorious for their historical inaccuracy and gloss over many aspects of their subjects' lives, especially their character flaws. And in both films the main villains are the representatives of a corrupt railroad company; during the era of the "New Deal" Hollywood seems to have been more critical of Big Business than it was to become after the war. The film's departures from historical fact are many and varied; some are major, others minor. Among the minor discrepancies; James's killer Robert Ford was much younger than the character played here by John Carradine. The maiden name of James's wife Zerelda (known as Zee) was Mimms, not Cobb. James and Zee were first cousins, but this fact is omitted from the script, possibly because cousin marriage, quite common in the America of James's day, had been banned in many states by 1939. More seriously, James's mother (also named Zerelda- her niece was named after her) was not killed by agents of the railroad as shown here. In fact, she outlived her son by many years, dying in 1911 at the age of 86. In the film it is this incident which forces Jesse and his brother Frank, previously honest, law-abiding young men, into a life of crime as they can see no other way of getting justice for their mother's death. In reality, the brothers began their life of crime as "bushwhackers", pro-Confederate irregulars during the Civil War, but the political aspects of their career are totally ignored by the film. The standard of acting tends to vary. Nancy Kelly makes a rather weak, simpering Zee, but the most annoying actor in the film must be Henry Hull as Zee's uncle Rufus, an elderly and comically eccentric newspaper editor. (The Annoying Old Man became a stock comic figure in Westerns; "They Died with Their Boots On" has another example in the figure of California). There is a running joke about how Rufus is always running the same editorial in his paper insisting that the only solution to the problems of the West is to take some group of people and "shoot them down like dogs", the only difference being the identity of the group which Rufus wants shot. (Politicians, lawyers, dentists, railroad executives). This sort of comic relief does not sit well with the generally serious, at times tragic, tone of the film, and seems particularly inappropriate in a film made in 1939, a year in which the leaders of Germany and Russia were, in all seriousness, advocating collective murder as the solution to all the world's problems. The two male leads, however, are splendid, their different styles of acting complementing each other well. Tyrone Power plays Jesse as the more dashing, hot-headed and impetuous of the two brothers, while Henry Fonda's Frank is the calmer and more level-headed. There is also a good contribution from Randolph Scott as Marshal Will Wright, the lawman investigating the crimes of the James gang. Marshal Wright is something of a morally ambiguous character; on the one hand he is a liberal who sees the James brothers as being as much sinned against as sinning and who is concerned that they receive a fair trial, unlike the railroad company who would prefer to see them lynched. On the other hand, there is an implication that he may be motivated as much by a romantic interest in Zee as by any abstract concern for justice. "Jesse James" was made in Technicolor at a time when black-and-white was very much the rule rather than the exception. This suggests that the studio intended it to be a grand, spectacular movie, and to some extent they succeeded in this. It's not quite "Gone with the Wind", but it contains a lot more in the way of action sequences than do most films from the thirties, and some of them stand out, particularly the train robbery and the raid on the bank at Northfield. Nobody would go to a film like this for a history lesson, at least not if you wanted a lesson about the life of Jesse James himself, although today films like this do, if only inadvertently, perhaps offer us a lesson about the period during which they were made. "Jesse James" today can be seen as a highly entertaining example of the way in which Hollywood sought to mythologise America's past and to provide folk- heroes for what was still a relatively young nation. This film might not show Jesse James as he was in real life, but it certainly shows him as people preferred to remember him. 7/10

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 dad—unbeknownst to everybody that Mr. Howard is really Jesse—and 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.'

I have been watching this movie since I was in the fourth grade. Its one of the best westerns i have ever seen. It does a real good job on showing the true story of Jesse James about how he was a hero. And considering people over the last 140 years have considered him to be Americas Robin Hood. They do good at that to. You can learn a lot from this movie about Jesse James but not just him also Frank James and Bob Ford and how the railroad at this time was taking everybody land. And how Jesse and Frank just said to everybody "We are not going to stand for this we are going to fight the railroad." I like what it says at the beginning about the railroad and the west. The music goes good with this movie. Especially at the end and thats real sad but Major Cobb does say a lot of good comments about Jesse.