REVIEW: I SHOT JESSE JAMES

“Assassino è colui che uccide altrui per danari”

“An assassin is one who kills others for money.”

- Dante Aligheri

In The Divine Comedy, Dante punishes the traitors far more severely than mere murderers: they are trapped in pools of ice up to their eyebrows, and any struggling efforts to free themselves only makes a breeze that freezes more water to trap them further. The past century and a half hasn't been much kinder to Robert Ford, that dirty coward who gunned down Confederate guerrilla turned train robber and folk hero Jesse James. As the song goes, “he ate of Jesse's bread and slept in Jesse's bed,” and worst of all, he shot a defenseless man in the back. His quick release by the governor suggested that the governor was in on the plan all along, and in Reconstruction-era Missouri, this was another example of a government acting as an adversary to the people. But to Sam Fuller, the death of Jesse James was something he'd had coming to him for quite some time. In 1949, Fuller sought to make a film that could elevate the people's opinion of Robert Ford. In I Shot Jesse James, Fuller suggests it was the love of a woman and a conscience, not just money, that made him pull the trigger.

Ford (played by John Ireland, a fine Western actor who later appeared on all the TV classics: Branded, Bonanza, Rawhide, and later Little House on the Prairie) is in love with actress with Cynthy Waters (Barbara Britton, later star of Bwana Devil), an actress. He longs for a proper life with Cynthy, a farm and a family, but that life can never happen when he's hiding out with the James gang. The governor of Missouri offers amnesty and $10,000 for Jesse James, dead or alive. Ford does the deed and is quickly pardoned, but finds himself perceived not as a hero, but a traitor. With only a fraction of the money he was originally offered, Ford sets out for Colorado to seek his fortune in a silver mine and provide Cynthy the life she deserves. Unfortunately, Cynthy is not waiting for him. She is humiliated by Ford's cowardly act and sees herself as the impetus for it. She tells her new love that she could never bear to be with a man who would do that to a friend, and that she never cared for him that much in the first place. Ford, who seems to have totally lost touch with reality by this point, cannot see the situation for what it is and seems doomed for destruction.

Our distaste for the way Jesse James met his end only works if we perceive it as something undeserved. As time rolled on into the Populist and Progressive movements, Jesse James took on the mantle of a Robin Hood of the rails, stealing only from the 'express' cars or robbing those evil banks, and distributing the spoils to the poor. However, there is no evidence, no matter how anecdotal, that the James gang shared the money with anyone but themselves. Train robberies in particular were seen as an act of Confederate resistance to Union modernization. Before the robbery days, Frank James was a member of Quantrill's gang*, who attacked Lawrence Kansas and killed every man and boy they found; Jesse was in a lesser-known group of bushwhackers who also participated. “Mr. Howard,” Jesse's alias, may have been a defenseless man in St. Joseph who was killed as he hung a picture on a wall, but Jesse James himself was a paranoid outlaw, a die-hard Confederate, a torturer of injured soldiers, a scalper, a murderer in his own right.

I Shot Jesse James is far from a perfect film. It's more character- than plot-driven, yet it's hard to feel bad for Robert Ford when his plan doesn't work out the way he'd planned. The adaptation of the tediously titled Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is certainly a more plausible explanation of Ford's motivations. But what Fuller’s debut achieves is reminding viewers that both parties are complicated men, and there is no honor among thieves.


* John Ireland, our Robert Ford, went on to play Gen. Quantrill in 1951’s Red Mountain.