Greenes Please don't spend money on this.

Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

InformationRap 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.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

utgard14 Jesse James is murdered by Bob and Charlie Ford (John Carradine, Charles Hadden). At first, Jesse's brother Frank (Henry Fonda) is content to let the law handle things. But when the Governor steps in to pardon the Fords, Frank decides to take matters into his own hands.Sequel to Jesse James is wildly historically inaccurate. But I expected as much going into it so that didn't bother me really. It's directed by Fritz Lang but you wouldn't know it as the direction is pretty workmanlike. It's filmed in Technicolor, which is nice. Henry Fonda stars and is likable. Jackie Cooper plays his sidekick and he's just awful. John Carradine is great as usual. It's always nice to see Henry Hull and Donald Meek, as well. This is the film debut of beautiful Gene Tierney. She looks lovely as ever, especially in Technicolor. It's not a bad western but not a particularly unique one. It's the kind of picture I would imagine appealed more to kids in 1940 than their parents.

johnnyboyz The Return of Frank James is the sequel I rather annoyingly discovered was as such to the previous year's 'Jesse James', the film ending up as quite the enjoyable, subversive little western drama; a film with a good eye on the closer, more intimate notions of people coexisting and becoming both rather fond and rather influenced by both those around them as well as particular ways of life amidst this broadly told tale of peril through the hostile terrains of the west. It is a revenge film of sorts, a revenge film about an individual we're coerced into rather liking who is the bandit brother of a man recently murdered out to get even with two other brothers whom we're invited to dislike through their cowardice and hunger for fame. The film is ultimately the revising of that titular Frank James, brother to infamous Old West bandit Jesse; the likes of whom we observe murdered in the opening scene: quietly, innocently and whilst in his own house. It is a film revising of what faceless image the man has through a number of performances within the performance, delivered through an array of rather gripping dramatic set pieces and chance scenes that encompasses a fitting sub-plot of a newspaper company trying to eke out the truth of the matter in what is a reoccurring notion of getting to grips with the reality of an issue.Frank, Henry Fonda repressing his role, is in a state of existing having long since fled that life of stage robberies and terror when he hears of his brother's death. He's both living and working both peacefully and anonymously on a ranch with that of a coloured live-in assistant named Pinky (Whitman) as well as a young Caucasian named Clem (Cooper); guns seemingly hung up for good and even going out of his way now to drink natural spring water, in what is a perfect, even homely, finding of one's self at peace with his array of ethnic friends on an upstanding locale of a farm. Trouble, though, rears up and threatens to quell this haven-like existence; news filtering through of that of Jesse's death by the brothers Bob (Carradine) and Charlie (Tannen) Ford as well as their consequent pardon near enough enraging Frank to tank to his piles of hay so as to untangle his firearms wrapped neatly in a blood red handkerchief naturally coloured that way. Clem, allured by Frank's energy and anger in what are the beginnings of a particular sub-text, cannot wait to tag along with Frank to help him do his dirty-work of wrecking a retribution, although is pushed back and told to maintain the ranch by a cautious James. Fearing missing out, he follows on anyway.Frank's eventual allies arrive in the form of a press house owning journalist named Rufus Cobb (Hull), a Major turned journalist and printer, who bounces out of his offices and bounds down the street accepting and distributing his fairly well-mannered will as he asks after people and their relatives, generally instilling a sense that he knows most of those in town. When the time comes to bond with those in a saloon, he, where everyone else turns away, embraces or indeed draws attention onto those Ford brothers occupying the same place. Tossed in for good measure is the refreshing presence of Gene Tierney, here playing an out-of-towner named Eleanor Stone; a fellow journalist oh-so-desperately wanting to be accepted as such who is here looking to cover events and rejects her newspaper owning father's desire for her respective domesticisation in the form of a life as someone's housewife. James gets wind of the Ford's apparent heading out to the West, a trek which he dutifully begins so as to find them; the film's nucleus one unfolding within a filmic world wrought with frayed morals beginning with the untimely shooting of an individual in their home without them able to defend themselves and the extending of that to a gentleman forcing himself out of the more morally inclined lifestyle he has carved out so as to essentially hunt and kill two men. The director, the German Fritz Lang here operating in Hollywood with their star and studio systems having fled Europe out of running afoul of the Nazi's, constructs that of a faceless persona of the titular lead within the film through demonised public displays of show and upsets the balance by covering Frank as methodically and in the rounded manner he does.Peppering proceedings, and keeping in sync with that notion reconstructing or deconstructing a specific male character, Clem and his affection towards Frank sees him desire Frank to keep on a narrower path of violence and retribution; Clem admiring Frank as this hard-bodied, no nonsense bandit whom, upon being told he may not join him on the vendetta, gazes frustratingly at the man riding off to wage a one-man war. Later, plot development arise which threaten to see Tierney's journalist come between he and Frank, something that does not go down well with Clem inferring his homoerotic tie to the man Clem has. Harking back to Andrew Dominik's 2007 film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, we observe a similarly themed notion of becoming preoccupied with that of one of the James brothers; a sense of both idolisation or homoeroticism in regards to a bandit or a life of banditry, the likes of which was executed methodically there and is done so here in a cutting, efficient manner that is difficult to dislike.

Steffi_P Some things in cinema never seem to change. The cash-in sequel is one of them. Fox's 1939 Production of Jesse James was an almost perfectly constructed example of that rare thing – a Western drama. Sure, it had an appropriate amount of action and cowboy business, but it also granted depth and humanity to its characters, giving as much weight to its intimate moments as its rip-roaring ones. In contrast, The Return of Frank James is a hearty cliché-fest, cheaply made and with an uncomplicated script by the disappointingly un-prestigious Sam Hellman.The director here is Fritz Lang, a man now best remembered for his starkly Germanic silent pictures, and the poverty row noir thrillers he made later on. A heroic Western would seem to be the absolute antithesis of his comfort zone. But there was another Fritz Lang, one of carefree, comic-book adventure, who made pictures like The Spiders, Frau im Mond and The Tiger of Eschnapur. True to the simplistic material, Lang shoots the action scenes with an emphasis on pace and excitement. And yet you can recognise his outsider's approach to the genre. Rather than showing off the vastness and beauty of the old west, he presents it as a harsh, almost alien terrain, full of barren mountains and spiky trees. But this doesn't come across as a cynical rejection of the romanticism of the frontier – after all he still draws attention to natural beauty in the scenes at the farm. It seems more the case that Lang wishes to show the west as a perilous landscape, making the adventure more frantic and the danger more genuine.You might also expect a director like Fritz Lang, whose shot composition was all about piercing shadows and swathes of grey, to struggle on his first Technicolor assignment. However Lang makes brilliantly restrained and practical use of colour, and really its no wonder since he pays such attention to detail in his shot compositions. In the first few scenes he strictly limits himself to a scheme of yellows and greys. Then, when Henry Fonda realises it's time to hunt down the Fords, we are suddenly jolted by a close-up of his gun wrapped in a bold red cloth. Throughout the picture Lang uses colour schemes to give mood and tone to each location, and even help define character. In the scene where Gene Tierney's character is first introduced, she is wearing a grey and maroon outfit that blends in with the plush décor of the hotel parlour.As with many directors with a strong visual style, Lang's Achilles heel was getting the best out of his actors. Lang seems to have had a particular fondness for hams and hamminess, and does not seem to have encouraged naturalism. The camera seems to linger longer than strictly necessary on the cartoonish comedy business of Henry Hull and Ernest Whitman. Henry Fonda seems barely interested and does little more than recite his lines. Gene Tierney is rather feeble, although to be fair this is her screen debut. Jackie Cooper is merely average. To be fair though, the screenplay doesn't really give any of the leads a chance to show off their dramatic skills. On the other hand, John Carradine, who for a primary villain has a bizarrely small part with virtually no dialogue, is nevertheless at his dastardly best, and effectively menacing in his wordless appearance at the end of the court scene.Lang by now had a reputation as a tyrant on the set and a pain to producers, and as such he was now being passed from studio to studio and assigned second rate projects like this. And while he clearly had respect for the American motion picture, he had become and would remain a Hollywood misfit. I suspect Henry Hull's constantly referring to Frank James' gun as a "weepon" may even have been a cheeky joke at the expense of Lang, who might have unknowingly been making the same mispronunciation. And yet it is really only Lang's odd yet innocently enthusiastic take on the Western that gives The Return of Frank James character, and make it at all worth watching today.

jc-osms A mixed bag here, with some fine cinematography and lead acting by Henry Fonda, honing up his taciturnity for its zenith in "My Darling Clementine" let down by some poor supporting acting from Gene Tierney (too soft-soap bland), Henry Hull (so over the top you wonder if Bugs Bunny's animators adapted him as the prototype for Yosemite Sam) and Jackie Cooper, (too old and goshdarn winsome for his part as Jesse's adolescent son) and worst of all a stereotyping of negroes which would have put "Gone with the Wind" to shame - we even get the word "darky" jarringly shoved in our faces twice. That the plot veers so drastically from the truth also mars believability not to mention credibility. Maestro Lang seems to me let down by some poor second unit work - there are some poor horse-riding process shots and an awful "dummy death down a cliff" and yet the landscapes are on a par with Ford and Mann and the action scenes have zip. I believe this was Fritz Lang's first Western outing and I think it shows. I prefer his film - noir work where he could more employ his expressionistic genius but this colourful potboiler entertains enough.