Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Tobias Burrows It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

grantss OK-to-dull. Really doesn't add anything to the Jesse James story. Yes, I know it was released in 1957 but I doubt anyone in 1957 felt more informed about Jesse James by seeing this movie. Pretty much a paint-by-numbers docu-drama.Also feels like some details are left out. Ending seems abrupt - pacing is a bit off.Good action sequences, so goodish purely as a western.Robert Wagner is miscast as Jesse James. Far too straight-laced for the role. Hope Lange gives a fairly wooden performance. Supporting cast aren't too bad though.

RanchoTuVu While there is the legend and the truth about Jesse James and his gang, this film, in which the title strongly implies a truthful account, perpetuates the legend of a man who was of the people and who robbed banks that grew rich at their suffering. Is there truth to the legend, then? Google it and find out. The film itself is a solid piece of work from director Nicholas Ray, who, another poster has written, disowned it since the studio forced him to follow a familiar and hokey flashback style. However, even that works out OK, as the film starts with James's biggest failure, the notorious Northfield Minnesota bank robbery fiasco, which it revisits later on to show how the gang was trapped and picked off by strategically placed sharpshooters. The acting is not that great, a factor that seems to be related to the script, but the story itself moves along and has many good scenes from the flashbacks, especially when Jame's neighbor whips him with his belt, and when preacher John Carradine baptizes Jesse and girlfriend Hope Lange on the banks of a river. The film includes some interesting "facts" (?) about the Northfield raid, one of which, the Swedish townsperson wanting to buy one of the gang's horses, made it into Walter Hill's The Long Riders. And the Ford brothers' betrayal is very well done and seemed to have been copied in the Brad Pitt film. Frank Gorshin was an excellent choice to play one of the Ford's. The portrayal of the Fords of hanging around in the background, but present nonetheless, adds a lot for the viewer who knows this story already. As Jesse, Robert Wagner wasn't great, but definitely up to the task. Jesse James is a legend, no matter what the real truth is about him.

jpdoherty Fox's "The True Story Of Jesse James" (1957) is a remarkably poor widescreen remake of their prestigious 1939 Tyrone Power/Henry Fonda classic "Jesse James". I'm not sure where the fault lies but the casting in this version of the two central characters, the uneven direction of Nicholas Ray and the ham-fisted screenplay must surely have something to do with it.In the late thirties and forties Tyrone Power was Fox's top leading man but in the fifties his star began to wane and studio head Darryl Zanuck started to groom newcomer Robert Wagner to take his place. This was a major error on Zanuck's part as Wagner proved to be a less than a suitable replacement. With the possible exceptions of "Broken Lance" (1954) and "Between Heaven & Hell" (1956) it is hard to think of Wagner distinguishing himself in anything! Also, Jeffrey Hunter was nothing more than a Fox contract player before being assigned to play Frank James to Wagner's Jesse in "The True Story Of Jesse James". Borrowed from the studio the previous year this actor's one distinguishing mark was his excellent and revealing performance in John Ford's classic "The Searchers". But his playing here, along with Wagner as the second half of the James Brothers, is nothing short of boring. Neither player bring any personality or colour to their respective roles. They totally miss the mark, lacking the charisma and appeal so vividly displayed by Power and Fonda in the original. The movie is also marred by too many flashbacks and with the all over the place screenplay Wagner, as the Robin Hood of the American west, comes across as a charmless introverted twit that you can feel no empathy for whatsoever. The supporting cast are hardly worth mentioning but it is a shame to see such a great actress as Agnes Moorhead barely getting a look in as Ma James.The best aspects of this uninvolving so-so western is the wonderful Cinemascope/Colour cinematography by the great Joe McDonald and the excellent music score by the underrated and little known composer Leigh Harline!

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.