I Shot Jesse James

Some time back I recorded I Shot Jesse James, and recently got around to watching it. It's available on DVD on an Eclipse Series set from Criterion along with the excellent The Baron of Arizona, should you wish to watch for yourself.

As you may recall from your history, or if you've watched enough westerns, the notorious outlaw Jesse James was shot and killed in 1882 by the coward Robert Ford.



Jesse James, in our movie, is played by Reed Hadley, the stentorian actor who provided narration for several of Fox's 1940s docudramas. By the time the movie starts, not long before he's killed, he's in hiding in St. Joseph, MO, together with his wife Zee (Barbara Woodell) and the Ford brothers, Charles (Tommy Noonan) and Robert (John Ireland, who is only third-billed which is a bit surprising considering he's the main character). Zee is worried about her husband, and Robert has worries of his own.

He's got a sweetheart in Cynthy (Barbara Britton), an actress for producer Harry Kane (J. Edward Bromberg), who has been traveling from town to town performing. She's back in St. Joseph, and Robert would like to marry her, but as an outlaw, so he'd never be free to settle down. And not that Cynthy would want to marry an outlaw anyway. There's another man, a failed silver prospector named John Kelley (Preston Foster), who likes Cynthy, but for the time being that may be just a platonic relationship.

And then Robert learns of an offer. The Governor of Missouri has offered an amnesty to the person who brings Jesse James in, alive or dead. That, and a $10,000 reward, which would be more than enough to buy some land and settle down with Cynthy. Now, there's no way Jesse is ever going to give himself up to the authorities to face trial, so Robert does something that seems logical to him: he shoots Jesse in the back.

However, the authorities renege on the reward, so while Robert gets his amnesty, he only gets $500. Worse, he gains notoriety for having killed Jesse James, and not in a good way. Everybody sees him, and more or less shuns him. So the only thing he can do is join Kane's theater troupe and do a special scene on how James was killed. You'd think Ford would embellish this to not make himself look like a coward, but one guesses everybody knew what happened.

Thankfully, there's a silver rush in Colorado, so Robert goes there to try to shake his past, as well as to make his fortune so that he can afford to marry Cynthy. While in Colorado he meets Kelley again, and helps a drunk prospector who actually has struck silver, so that drunk lets Robert co-work the claim in order to earn his money to be able to mary Cynthy. The problem is, Cynthy may not want to marry him....

This was the first feature film directed by Samuel Fuller, who did things his way and has a fairly distinctive style. That makes I Shot Jesse James interesting, and the sort of movie that people are going to praise a little more than it deserves. It's more than good enough, but I also found it not quite as good as some of Fuller's later work. Then again, I saw it after seeing something like Gregory Peck's The Gunfighter which explores many of the same themes and had a big studio behind it; and after a fair number of Fuller's other movies, so I may have had too high of an expectation for it.

It's unfortunate that the Eclipse set with I Shot Jesse James only has three movies on it and is a bit pricier (the three Eclipse sets I've picked up have more films and cost less), because all three of the movies on the set deserve to be better known.