Jesse James, an Outlaw for All Seasons

Kimberly French/Warner Brothers Pictures
Brad Pitt plays Jesse James in Andrew Dominik’s new movie.


By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

The New York Times
Published: September 16, 2007

JESSE JAMES was in his short lifetime (1847-82) the most celebrated outlaw in the United States, maybe the world, and has managed to remain so even in death. Thanks in large part to the movies, which, for a while anyway, could be relied on to crank up a new version of the James gang mythology every few years or so. In the long-gone days of B westerns it was a lot more often than that. But the pace has slackened dramatically in the past three decades. We satisfy our guilty-pleasure appetite for vicarious criminality with different sorts of charismatic bad guys now.

Andrew Dominik’s ambitious new film, “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (opening Friday), feels more like a novelty than it would have in, say, the 1950s, when westerns were as ubiquitous as tumbleweeds in a ghost town, or even in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when the counterculture grooved on the romance of banditry. It seems as if it has been a while since we’ve seen Jesse and his brother Frank and their narrow-eyed partners in crime stride slowly, warily into a bank or thunder down on a train, their long-handled pistols held high in the air, dusters flapping behind them.

Actually the last major-studio Jesse James picture came out a scant six years ago — “American Outlaws,” directed by Les Mayfield (“Flubber”) and starring Colin Farrell as handsome Jesse — though it bears so little resemblance to historical truth (or, for that matter, a plausible lie) that it probably shouldn’t count. Practically the only interesting thing about that instantly forgotten movie is the shamelessness of its attempt to tart up the Jamesian legends with contemporary attitudes. It’s the beer-commercial version, all joshing and wisecracking and frat-boy camaraderie. And it has, as the real Jesse James did not, a happy ending.

Risible as “American Outlaws” is, it’s hardly the first western to seem more strongly colored by the preoccupations of the time in which it was made than by those of the time in which it’s set. Historical accuracy never really had much to do with the western’s cultural value, or with our long affection for it. Westerns are the stories we used to tell ourselves about our origins, about the sources of our native pluck and resilience. They were part of the messy, improvisational process by which Americans define — and revise, and define again — a national self-image, and one of the many reasons to regret the demise of westerns is that without them it’s just a little tougher for us to figure out who we are. (These days we need all the help we can get.)

“The Assassination of Jesse James” is nearly as glum as “American Outlaws” is inanely buoyant. Is it safe to say that the national mood has darkened in the last six years? Mr. Dominik’s movie, which stars Brad Pitt as a weathered-looking Jesse and Casey Affleck as Robert Ford, the creepy young hanger-on who shoots him in the back, has a bit of the tentative, meandering, exploratory quality of a ’70s revisionist western: Mr. Pitt appears at times to be channeling Warren Beatty’s squinty performance in Robert Altman’s “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” (1971), and the relationship between the outlaw and his assassin carries more than a faint whiff of the dance-of-death fatalism that Sam Peckinpah imparted to his 1973 “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid.” The new movie doesn’t know quite how to feel about either of its main characters, except that each, in his different way, is something of a con artist, and that each, also in a different way, is an extremely sad man.

This melancholy, uncertain tone makes a sharp contrast to Samuel Fuller’s “I Shot Jesse James” (1949), which tells more or less the same story in a manner as bold and punchy and confident as its tabloidy title would lead you to expect: nothing tentative about Mr. Fuller’s style, even in his first picture. (It recently made its debut on DVD as part of a Criterion box called “The First Films of Samuel Fuller.”)

But there are, movie history has shown, a fair number of ways to approach the Jesse James saga. A good deal of the enduring fascination of James — and of outlaws in general — is that he’s an ambiguous figure, attractive in some respects, repellent in others. This leaves plenty of wide-open spaces for interpretation and perhaps for the projection of our own conflicted feelings about the relative merits of law and rowdy, hell-for-leather lawlessness.

Jesse James was even in his own brief day seen by many as a kind of Robin Hood, though, as T. J. Stiles’s excellent 2002 biography “Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War” points out, the conviction with which people held this view depended to an extent on whether they shared his dedication to the failed cause of the Confederacy.

In the movies, of course, the young, dashing, fearless bank or train robber will always enjoy a wee visual advantage over the respectable businessmen he torments, with their paunches, receding hairlines, stiff collars and unmanly anxieties about the safety of their money and pampered skins. And filmmakers tend to rub it in by casting exceptionally good-looking guys as Jesse: the likes of Mr. Pitt and Mr. Farrell and, in earlier versions, Tyrone Power, Robert Wagner, Rob Lowe. But moviemakers also tend to have qualms about promoting antisocial behavior — even by bona fide historical figures — too vigorously.

So every film portrayal of Jesse James is to some degree a showdown between sympathy and antipathy, with the outcome always in doubt. Henry King’s splashy, enjoyable, utterly unreliable 1939 “Jesse James” (the Tyrone Power one) puts its ambivalence right up front, in an opening title that reads, in part, “It was this uncertain and lawless age that gave to the world, for good or ill, its most famous outlaws, the brothers Frank and Jesse James.”

For good or ill? Maybe ambivalence is too kind a word for writing like that. But this is a movie that tries awfully hard to be reasonable, in a socially conscious Depression-era way, that wants us to understand, as Jesse’s eulogist says in the final scene, that “he wasn’t altogether to blame for what his times made him.” To ensure that audience would get the point, though, the film has to make Jesse’s times look suspiciously like the 1930s, with honest, simple rural folk turned into thieves and fugitives by the greed of big business, and then hounded to their deaths.

When Nicholas Ray got around to making what he called “The True Story of Jesse James” (the Robert Wagner one) in 1957, the spin was different. It’s a darn sight more accurate than Mr. King’s movie, but, this being the ’50s, there’s a touch of the juvenile delinquent to the James boys here. They are impressively coiffed — hair combed scrupulously back at the sides, but with a lock or two flopped broodingly over the forehead — and they do not always wear shirts. And when things start to go bad for the gang, and Jesse turns mean, Frank explains it like this: “In the beginning, we had a reason.” In other words, Jesse’s become a rebel without a cause, a notion that probably rang a bell with Mr. Ray.

Philip Kaufman’s “Great Northfield Minnesota Raid,” which opened in 1972 and is finally coming to DVD later this month, suffers no such agonies of explanation. In the manner of its own much more casual time, it doesn’t fret about responsibility (or historical precision) but simply straps on its outlaw spirit and goes out to take what it can get: a little action, a few laughs, some wayward, out-of-the-blue lyricism. It’s closer in tone to French New Wave pictures like “Shoot the Piano Player” than to a traditional western, and that too is a quality of its time.

And Walter Hill’s “Long Riders” (1980), also dispenses, to its benefit, with any social or psychological apologia for the Jameses and their gang and proves that you can make a beautiful, thoroughly traditional western without any such hemming and hawing. He treats the James myth as a story about home and family ties, casting brothers — Keaches, Carradines, Quaids and Guests — as brothers, and alternating spectacular, Kurosawa-like action sequences with community gatherings and quiet courtship rituals.

Mr. Hill’s movie, like Mr. Kaufman’s, doesn’t waste breath on theories, homilies or attitude adjustment. It concerns itself only with the job of making something interesting and putting it out in the world. And then it says: Take it or leave it. That’s as American as Jesse James