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King's original serves Nicholas Ray's remake as it did Lang's sequel, the Northfield bank robbery comes early in anticipation of The Wild Bunch. The aftermath has a striking CinemaScope rectangle, the cluttered gazette office with the sheriff's office visible from the window on the screen's left corner and the editor with his back to the camera, not ready to write the outlaw's obituary. Jesse James (Robert Wagner), that "curious mixture" of marauder and misfit, a child of the Civil War. "If I'm old enough to get whipped, I'm old enough to fight back." Holdups with brother Frank (Jeffrey Hunter), revenge that costs amnesty, the perilous call of domesticity. The runaways' refuge from They Live by Night has a Rubens painting of Mars and Venus, Jesse deems it "indecent" to the disappointment of his bride (Hope Lange): "Couldn't we pretend it's Adam and Eve?" Studio interference carved the intended ballad form, scrambled stanzas remain in the peculiar flashback structure. American folklore has its cutthroat side, "it comes easy in this business," the antihero's cohorts dwindle as the bounty for his capture increases. Agnes Moorehead and John Carradine in old-age makeup adduce notes from Welles and Ford, Cole Younger (Alan Hale Jr.) reading a penny dreadful on "misunderstood" bandits might be Ray flipping through Cahiers du Cinéma. Jesse takes out a photographer's lens in the middle of a shootout, his own fateful bullet hits under the homemaking plaque ("Hard word spells success"). For the film that might have been there's the blind Black singer in a tableau of townspeople, and Penn's The Left-Handed Gun the following year. With Alan Baxter, Rachel Stephens, Barney Phillips, Biff Elliot, Frank Overton, Chubby Johnson, John Doucette, Frank Gorshin, and Carl Thayler.
--- Fernando F. Croce |