Overlooked Movies: The True Story of Jesse James

What do you think when you see a the title of a Hollywood movie like The True Story of Jesse James? Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I think that probably everything I see in the movie is going to be pretty far from the truth, and that turns out to be the case with The True Story of Jesse James. 

Robert Wagner is Jesse, who sports the definitive 1950s haircut. Jeffery Hunter is Frank, whose haircut is nearly as good. 

Now I’ll digress, if I haven't already. Not long ago I reviewed Black Bart a pretty dang good 1940s western with even less historic material than this one.  It's more fun, too.  But that’s not the point. The point is that the climactic scene of Black Bart seems to have been pretty much borrowed intact by William Goldman for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I couldn’t rouse any comments about that on the blog post at the tme, but maybe somebody will speak up now. 

To continue the digression, the opening of The True Story of Jesse James is the Northfield raid, followed by a chase scene organized by the Remington (why not call it Pinkerton if this is the true story?) detective agency. The chase shows huge numbers of men chasing Jesse and Frank, and it looks and ends pretty much just like a famous scene in, you guessed it, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. You can see a tiny bit of it in the trailer. I think Goldman committed another homage in his movie. Anybody else want to say something? I’d sure like to get some more opinions on this. 

Now back to our regularly scheduled review. Wagner and Hunter get to do a couple of shirtless scenes, which surely helped sell the movie to teen girls in the ‘50s, so there’s that. It’s not a bad movie, but in spite of that and Cinemascope and its good production values, it never really rises above the pack. And it sure never gets too close to the truth. Beyond Hunter and Wagner, there’s a good cast that includes Hope Lange, Agnes Moorehead, John Carradine, Allan Hale, Jr., and Frank Gorshin. I liked the blind guy at the end who apparently makes up “The Ballad of Jesse James” on the spot and sings it. I had a little cardboard 78 of this song when I was a kid, and I sang it relentlessly. So I grew up with the legend of Jesse as the Robin Hood of the West, which the movie perpetrates against all the historical evidence. But to paraphrase a line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, when the truth becomes legend, we might as well sing the legend. The Kingston Trio did a great version of the song in the early ‘60s to lead off their first album with John Stewart replacing Dave Guard. The KT was never the same for me, but I like their version of the song, anyway.