Jesse James at the turn of the century: two modern versions
Frank and Jesse (Trimark, 1995)
Another chapter was added to the Book of Jesse in the 1990s, Frank and Jesse (1995), in which Jesse was impersonated by Rob Lowe. (There was also Purgatory in 1999 but that is reviewed elsewhere, so click the link if you are interested).
Frank and Jesse is frankly a pretty
tired and clichéd telling of the tale. Frank and Jesse’s Pappy is murdered
because the railroad wants his property so the boys vow vengeance and start
robbing businesses owned by the railways. Really, this won’t do in 1995. We
should have got past that. Firstly, it is not true and secondly it is simplistic
and thirdly it’s been done to death.
The film goes for a fashionable
90s dark look (though Unforgiven it
ain’t) and for slight weirdness. There are lines like, “I know I could kill you.
I’m just not convinced you’d stay dead.”
The acting is average at best
and you could not say that any of the principals are convincing. Rob Lowe plays a one-dimensional Jesse, Bill Paxton is a surprisingly boring Frank, and country singer
Randy Travis plays a flat Cole Younger, who suddenly starts narrating in the
last reel for some odd reason.
The screenplay is poor. It’s as
if the writer suddenly remembered that Frank and Jesse were supposed to have
fallen out, so half way through the movie he cut in a scene in which Jesse shouts
at Frank and pulls a gun on him, then it’s never mentioned again. It’s either
bad writing or directing (Robert Boris, who did both) or bad editing (Christopher Greenbury)
- or all three.
The film does at least look at
the help the murderers got from the local population a bit more than some
movies and does make the James gang out to be fairly ordinary guys rather than
dashing superheroes, so that’s a plus. But it’s still clearly on the side of
the poor, put-upon underdog Jameses, and Pinkerton (William Atherton) is the
evil, implacable Northern corporate persecutor.
The very nasty Archie Clements,
Bloody Bill Anderson’s scalper in chief who was so admired by Jesse and whom
Jesse followed down to Texas, becomes just another James gang member.
Frank is the real author of the
letters to the papers in Jesse’s name, which seems implausible to say the
least. There’s no John Newman Edwards (there’s a reporter named Zack Murphy
instead). Frank and Jesse’s stepfather is “Ruben Samuels” (John Stiritz) and
their mother (Mari Askew) is once again “Ma James”. There’s some absurdity
about the guerrillas being forced to take the oath of allegiance at gunpoint,
as if it were Josey Wales or something.
The usual inventions and nonsense, in fact.
Some of the Walt Lloyd
cinematography is attractive (pleasant Arkansas locations standing in for
Missouri) and the movie isn’t cheap or studio-bound. It just needed better
directing, writing, editing and acting, that’s all.
Really, you’ve seen it all
before. And done better.
American Outlaws (Warner Bros, 2001)
Warner Brothers’ American Outlaws came out in 2001, directed by Les Mayfield, his only Western (it shows, but he was born in New Mexico so I forgive him) and written by Roderick Taylor, an academic and poet, and John Rogers, a physics student and comedian (who weren’t so I don’t).
No, bad is still bad actually, as far as movies go
It didn’t pay for itself at the
box office and received dismal reviews, the critics saying it was just a Young Guns rip-off, it was childish, it
was a travesty historically and had no sense of time or place. I don’t know
about the critics but personally, I think that it was just a Young Guns rip-off, it was childish, it
was a travesty historically and had no sense of time or place.
It’s as if it was made by
people who had never read anything about Jesse James and never seen any of the
movies. They aimed at the juvenile market with one-line quips and stunts. I imagine them saying over their cappuccinos,
“Let’s do for Jesse James what Fox did for Billy the Kid!”
“Great idea! We’ll have popular young comedy/action stars as Jesse and Frank, an Irishman and a New Yorker, who know nothing at all about Westerns. They’ll fit in well.”
“Let’s do for Jesse James what Fox did for Billy the Kid!”
“Great idea! We’ll have popular young comedy/action stars as Jesse and Frank, an Irishman and a New Yorker, who know nothing at all about Westerns. They’ll fit in well.”
Authentic, huh
Rotten Tomatoes says: “With corny dialogue, revisionist history, anachronistic music, and a
generically attractive cast, American
Outlaws is a sanitized, teenybopper version of Jesse James.”
Yup.
The trailer (external link)
will give you the idea. Saves you having to watch the movie. You can read the
deathless prose of the script here (also external) if you’ve a mind to, which I doubt.
Kathy Bates hams it up dreadfully as “Ma James” while erstwhile James Bond Timothy Dalton plays Pinkerton with
a cod Scottish accent. Comedy star Ali Larter is eye-candy as a babe Zee with
highlights (if you are still allowed to say babe). (Or eye-candy). Various
popular young actors are bratpack James gang members. Marc Savlov in The Austin Chronicle says they are “fresh-faced up-and-comers
sporting pearly whites so dazzling the reflected glare could bring down the
entire Texas Air National Guard.” None of these actors
had been in Westerns. We do get Harris Yulin (Wyatt Earp in Doc) as the inevitable evil railroad
baron, so that’s something, I suppose.
It was shot in Texas. They had a train. The music (Trevor
Rabin) is quite ghastly.
Been there, done that
Roger Ebert in the Chicago
Sun-Times said, “Imagine the cast of American Pie
given a camera, lots of money, costumes and horses, and told to act serious and
pretend to be cowboys, and this is what you might get.”
Oh,
that’s enough about this dog.
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