THE GREAT NORTHFIELD MINNESOTA RAID (1972)

Another Jesse James picture?  What makes this one different?  This film from director Philip Kaufman has a narrow focus, concerning itself mainly with the titular event, which showed up as the finale of The Long Riders, but is portrayed much differently here and serves as the bulk of the film.  James is one of our twin protagonists, the other being Cole Younger again.  Jesse James is played by Robert Duvall (same year as The Godfather) but again his depiction is far cry from what might be expected.  This James is ignorant, careless, sloppy, fanatical, shortsighted, petty and seems to have become such a great outlaw solely by luck and good company.  Cole Younger, by far the wiser of the two, is played by Cliff Robertson who is best known nowadays as Uncle Ben in the Spiderman Trilogy.  Dirtier and grimier than most westerns, with loads more period language thrown in to boot, this film seems more authentic even when its differs from history.

Some of the crew might be familiar if you've seen other Jesse James films.  Clell Miller appears again, but as an again mountain man who agrees to saddle up for 'one last job' and Jim Younger appears more like he did in real life, which is to say, silent and with a scarf bundled up over his huge never-healed face wound.  They also have Charley Pitts the medicine man, a superstitious fellow who uses words like 'asafetida'.  Actually this movie has a lot of scenes like that; Cole uses the phrase 'and it ain't no haziyappi' when trying to convince a crowd that he is not embellishing a tall tale.

The Civil War is obviously an open wound with Jesse and the men he leads; he refers to 'enemy territory' and 'the war never ended' openly and frequently, and makes it known that its alright to kill someone, so long as they're a Yankee.  In this version, Jesse himself conceives of the disastrous Northfield Raid, cribbed from old notes by Cole Younger, and launches it as a retaliatory measure after some of the gang is ambushed at a local cat house.  This film definitely has more prostitutes than the other Jesse James movies I reviewed; at one point people even pick up whores on their backs and race back and forth down the halls to the cheers of their friends.

The film contains some awkward social commentary, beginning with a revisionist origin for the James-Younger game that identifies animosity towards railroads as the impetus behind their outlaw ways (an origin so ridiculous that the rest of the movie seems to ignore it) and continuing with its depiction of the townsfolk of Northfield: comically corrupt, cartoonishly cruel, and stupid as the day is long.  The gang manages to ally with a crooked banker in plot to trick the townspeople into depositing their money into the very bank they plan to rob; at least they mention the Panic of 1873 and resulting fear of banks to somewhat justify it.  The townspeople also throw rocks at a confused old man looking for his dead son; they also lynch random innocents after the robbery.

At least the gang gets to enjoy a baseball game with the townsfolk before the robbery, and its the kind of game that involves guns and ends with the score 46-47.  New technology also features, with people gasping in awe at a steam powered tractor moving through town ('that locomotive's jumped the tracks!') and a steam-powered calliope purchased by the bank to attract customers ends up serving prominently in the finale; a little too prominently actually.  The town crazy wanders by during the robbery, and Charley Pitts, standing guard, shoos him off.   Then the crazy coot starts banging on the keys of the calliope, so Charley shoots him in the back.

So if the goal was to shut him up, by any means necessary, then why the fuck do they leave where him he dies, slumped over on the calliope, producing a sustained, steady, loud tone that alerts the entire town?  Amidst all the other fuckery that happens, nobody bothers to roll the dead old bastard off the noise-making machine that he collapsed on.  This mistake allows the robbers inside the bank to get distracted, the time-locked safe is shut, and the townspeople start assembling with their weapons.  It seems like it would have been an instantaneous, subconscious response: push the old dude off the button that equals death.  But they just leave him there until eventually one of the townspeople picks him up to check if he's really dead.

Despite the muddled history and ham handed social commentary, the movie does function strongly as a biography of two figures that only focuses on one key incident in their lives, similar to the approach of such pseudo-biographies as Topsy-Turvy, The Queen, Invictus, etc.  Jesse James is a Confederate Fanatic, a former child soldier who could never shake his war time lifestyle, a fanatic who believes his own hype, and who seems destined for the bitter end that his final scene foreshadows, even before the narrator flat out tells us what would happen to him.  Once again, however, Cole Younger steals the show: early in the film he sits on a porch at a country store and entertains a crowd that might as well be the audience by showing off his lucky charm: a quarter inch leather bracer, sun-dried and brine soaked, that he wears under his shirt without fail, riddled with bullet holes but responsible for him eventually surviving a decades-long outlaw career having been shot an astonishing 26 times.  Cole Younger manages to live into ripe, old age, even as most everybody else ends up dead or in prison, so his final fate, like the ending to Tombstone, is upbeat and uplifting, a nice departure from genre conventions that nonetheless stays true to history.