Sadly Over-hyped

Don't Believe the Hype

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Sam Fuller's writer/ director debut foreshadows much of the quirky originality one would come to expect from his pictures in the decades to follow. Leave it to Sam to have a protagonist that cowardly shoots an infamous icon in the back as opposed to making another oater featuring Jesse James. I Shot Jesse James is a fresh approach to the western canon and from this angle makes for a more than satisfying ride for a B western with something extra. Jesse James is living incognito in St. Joe MO with his family as well as providing shelter for the Ford brothers. When Bob Ford (John Ireland) learns he can receive amnesty as well as a fat reward for Jess dead or alive he plans his future to run off with his entertainer girl friend and start anew. After performing the dastardly act he fails to get the full reward so he agrees to go on tour re-creating the scene on stage as well as avoid a similar fate.Fuller presents James as a decent man while Ford displays a loutish personality filled with jealousy and paranoia. Ireland does a fine job of managing to evoke sympathy for a an execrable character looking for a way out as he displays just enough sensitivity to temper his surly ways. Eventually you find yourself rooting for him and perhaps identifying with him since he is not only an assassin but a dreamer as well.

"Whatya got to eat?" asks Bob Ford, who backshot his great friend Jesse James not too long ago. Says Joe, the bartender at the Silver King Saloon in Creede, Colorado, "Sweet corn, cornmeal mush, cornpone with cracklins and corn whiskey." "I'll have it," says Bob. Lukewarm corn, cooked ambitiously, is about all there is in Sam Fuller's debut as a director. Fuller had been writing scripts and story outlines in Hollywood for quite awhile. Finally he made a three-movie deal with a B movie producer: If I can direct the movies, and I won't charge you, I'll write the screenplays. The first of the three, I Shot Jesse James, is a potentially intriguing story of a loser, but told with a script that has little tension, directed with little flair and acted, for the most part, with a dull, steady cadence. A good deal of the dialogue and many of the actors are just competent. Still, if you're a Fuller fan, I Killed Jesse James may be worth watching. It's part of Criterion's Eclipse Series 5 - The First Films of Samuel Fuller. The set includes The Baron of Arizona and Steel Helmet. Fuller, in my view, was not one of the great directors (or screenwriters; he usually wrote his own screenplays). He wasn't one of the great craftsmen, either. What he had was a tough, knock-about personal story, a confident willingness to dance to his own music, a streak of subversiveness that could undermine the fatuousness of Hollywood, the establishment and the nervous, and enough talent to take the commonplace material and actors he often was dealt and turn at least parts of his movies into something to admire. He was the kind of Hollywood non-Hollywood director that some cineastes and film critics adore. It would take a person wearing blinders, however, not to recognize that his movies are, at best, variable. Most of them don't hold up very well unless the viewer has been first captured by Sam Fuller's iconic anti-establishment reputation. Pickup on South Street is probably his best work, with fine performances by an A-level cast, an unusual script considering it was originally intended as an anti-Commie screed, and a story that Fuller keeps moving along. The Big Red One, highly praised by many, is an effective and realistic war movie dear to Fuller's heart. But it seems (to me) to go indulgently on and on and on. For the rest of his movies, those that I've seen, there's just excellent bits and pieces mixed into a B-movie sensibility, awkward dialogue (almost any scenes involving a man and woman), and too much discursiveness. Fuller, in my opinion, needed a strong editor to work with and a strong writer with whom to collaborate. I have a feeling that Fuller would find either prospect completely unsatisfactory. Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, anointed by Criterion, for me aren't just pulp movies, they're almost embarrassing examples of overwrought pulp movies. This is all just opinion. Watch The Naked Kiss and see what you think.But back to I Shot Jesse James. When Bob Ford (John Ireland) puts a bullet in the back of his friend, Jesse James, Ford hopes to gain amnesty and a large reward. He'd been befriended by James and had been part of James' gang. Ford wants to marry the love of his life, the singer Cynthy Waters (Barbara Britton). He thinks he can leave the criminal life and settle down with Cynthy. Instead she rejects him. He's called a coward and a backshooter. Most people hold him in contempt. He gets only a small part of the reward. He still thinks that if only he can make money he can win Cynthy. And there's that straight talking' guy who likes Cynthy, too, a man named John Kelley (Preston Foster, top billed) who keeps showing up. There's a showdown, and that's that. John Ireland, in my view, had a lot of screen presence, but he needed a good script and strong direction to be at his best. Just watch him as Fantail in Raw Deal (1948), as Cherry Valance in Red River (1948) and as Jack Burden in All the King's Men (1949). Even in a piece of Brit noir schlock, The Glass Tomb (1955), he brings enough quality and interest to make it worth watching. Here, he's constrained by an uninspired script that gives him no opportunity to do anything but show what a sad sack loser Bob Ford is. But wait until that showdown. It only lasts a couple of minutes, but John Ireland shows what he can do.

After seeing The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, one realizes just how dated this film is as compared to the one that Casey Affleck won an Academy Award nomination for. That more recent film is far closer to the truth. It certainly has the right age for Robert Ford in real life was barely out of his teens, not an adult as John Ireland was in this film, nor a host of others who've played Ford in various Jesse James movies.Still this western made by Samuel Fuller, his first as a director, does have a landmark status of sorts with a fine performance by John Ireland in the title role. According to this version he did this one for love and that huge amnesty money promised by the Governor of Missouri which he never got, that part is true. It was love of Barbara Britton who plays the object of Ireland's affections.The real Robert Ford and John Ireland in this film must have thought he'd be a hero. His celebrity such as it was was akin to what O.J. Simpson got after his acquittal. People who kill for a bounty were regarded then as now as a necessary evil, but not folks you invite to your dinner table. Samuel Fuller got good performances out of Ireland, Britton and the rest of a fine cast. It's not a bad Jesse James film, a man who has never ceased to fascinate Hollywood.

It's one of the oldest Western stories: Jesse James was a big-time outlaw, robbing banks left and right, alongside his gang, including Robert Ford. One day, upon hearing of the huge bounty (and possibility of amnesty for anyone in the gang) for Jesse's murder, Ford took it upon himself to kill him so that he could be free and clear to mary his would-be wife. But things didn't quite turn out right afterwords, and Ford was considered more-so a coward, a traitor for doing this act, and any gunslinger who could gun Ford down would then be seen as the baddest dude in the west. At least, that's the legend anyway that comes out of the main plot. But there's more to it, at least under the surface, that Samuel Fuller gets to in his take on the legend of one man's existential downfall from killing his best friend, who happened to be the most feared- and yet most admired- bank robber in America for a short while. Fuller might be asking why he was admired, when he didn't do anything that really merited praise only in hindsight. There's a sense of pure melodrama, brimming with acting that is typical for the budget, but somehow Fuller brings out the best in what might be a little limited in the character actors.John Ireland says a lot in the understated expressions on his face, the tense feeling of rejection from the only one he can get close to- once Jesse is out of the picture- and likewise Cynthy (Barbara Britton) is very good at doing the 'acting-concerned' woman that is reluctant to be on Ford's sleeve. It's all the more compelling because Fuller could easily make the direction more into a black and white category, that Ford is bad like Jesse was, and Cynthy is more than in her reasoning for not wanting to marry him. But even in the pulpy world of Jesse James and Robert Ford, there is room for compromise. I liked seeing the scenes where Ford goes through the humiliating act of doing a theater re-enactment of the killing scene, but suddenly seeing in a vision the actual act he performed superimposed over the pantomime. And, immediately after, as one of the very best scenes in the film, a traveling singer who sings a song terrified in Ford's face about how much of a traitor he was for killing such a man like Jesse James.It's a sharp script considering what Fuller would have to work with, but it's also the simplicity of his craft (it might be one of those genre films where the style is so stripped down to bare essentials with necessary close-ups, consistent medium shots, that when something 'stylistic' happens like in the last shootout between Kelly and Ford that it is shocking), how Fuller pushes it into looking like a tale that on the surface as a conventional feature. But watch how the suddenness of violence sparks up interest in the craft, how the opening bank robbery is timed and shot with the same level- or even more- tension than your average heist thriller. Or in the actual infamous scene itself, which is preceded by Ford getting a chance beforehand when James was in the bath, and the cut-aways to the POV at the back. It's bold-faced type through a crisp full-frame lens.And while Fuller would still go on to make greater films, I Shot Jesse James is a fantastic prototype for a great career, where history merges with the human process of change, and how love, however a typical thing in a triangle situation, complicates even the strongest of men.