Genre – Western
Movie Total Runtime – 1 Hour 20 Minutes
Spoilers – Yes
I got this in a different multi-movie box of old Westerns. I’m hoping this one doesn’t require subtitles. The last six reviews were all subtitled works. But, depending on the accent, sometimes English can require subtitles. (Or whatever it is the Scots call their muddied attempt at speech) But, this was midcentury Hollywood, I expect enunciation. Headlining our cast is Audie Murphy, who I recognize from his military accolades, but have not seen his acting work. The rest of the cast does not have names that jump out at me.
We start with a civil war reenactment using only a little powder in the cannon such that they do not recoil an inch when fired. This always bugs me. It bugged me in that movie about the Siege of Vienna, it bugs me here. Cannon recoil hard. To see them flash and not move just pulls me back out of the scene, and this scene barely started. The narrator tells us that the outlaws under Quantrill are bad people. From the dialog, the movie is set during the war, as the riders reach Lawrence Kansas and debate the risks of a Union Garrisson in the city. Our speakers are not uniformed, wearing generic cowboy outfits – and I can’t tell them apart. Hollywood white guys with limited distinguishing features. I’ll figure out some way to differentiate them.
The local militia takes a disliking to the cast and a short scuffle results in them being taken into custody. At which point they are forced to identify themselves. We get Frank and Jesse James, as well as Cole and Jim Younger.
*headdesk*
I mentioned in “The Outlaw” how I dislike the use of historical figures as characters in movies. The Militia was planning to hang the gang and save us the movie, but a Union Cavalry Captain intervened and we’re stuck with the outlaw gang. I also know from my overall understanding of history that we’re not going to see these characters killed.
To satisfy an early action quota, the gang chases a runaway wagon driven by a woman who can’t rein in the horses. They help her, but is unhappy when she figures they are going to join up with Quantrill. She departs leaving the gang to ride on. We next see the gang as prisoners of the raiders alongside a squad of union soldiers. Quantrill ‘holds court’ over the assorted prisoners, executing the union soldiers as spies rather than hold them as Prisoners of War. They also shoot a civilian who ambushed some of the raiders after they killed his family. For some reason, after seeing these war crimes, the gang still wants to sign up. Jesse gets into a knife fight with the third in command of the raiders. The choreography is laughable, but the fight ends with Jesse murdering the other once he was down and out of the fight.
The woman from the carriage tries to talk sense into the gang as they’re burying the dead guy. Of course it doesn’t work. They swear in to the raiders. Quantrill fills Jesse’s head with fluff about how the fact that the Union controls the Mississippi River in it’s entirety, has the coast blockaded, and Lee is in retreat from Gettysburg is not a bad sign for the Confederate cause. Quantrill gets sloshed while repeating himself about his delusions of inevitable victory. His band has swelled to the grand size of… one hundred. Tiny for a cavalry contingent, large for the outlaw pillagers they are.
I can’t really rein in my biases. I don’t hold anything against the people who fought on either side. I had family on both. I do despise the lionization of real criminals. Quantrill appoints Jesse to replace his dead third in command, much to the displeasure of longer-standing members of the organization. I know they won’t shoot him in the back, since that is reserved for Rob Ford in a few decades. We find that Jesse is deluding himself about the kind of man Quantrill is and the kind of ‘war’ he’s engaged in. Quantrill sends the James gang to attack a farmhouse claiming Union troops are quartered there. The residents try to defend themselves, but are gunned down. With nobody in uniform, it’s hard to tell who’s who. The criminals loot the farm and Jesse finds out there’s never any Union soldiers at any of their targets. The Raiders gun down any survivors they can find.
The Cavalry arrives in time to hear the Raiders assembling to flee the scene, but fail to intercept the criminals. Jesse gets mopey as his idealism cracks. Jesse makes his speech about wanting to fight the Militia rather than plundering homesteads. Rather than take the suggestion of the second in command to execute Jesse, Quantrill just leaves him behind and goes on another pillaging run. The one woman in the movie once again tries to talk sense into Jesse. Quantrill talks poison into Jesse afterwards. They prepare to attack Lawrence.
Historically, this event is known as the Lawrence Massacre, if that gives any indication of how things shake out. Whooping and hollering, the Raiders ride in to town, shooting it out with the Militia. The James gang is assigned to loot the bank. On the way out, the find the Raiders are still up to their existing tactics of killing all and sundry while Quantrill extorts the civilians.
The Cavalry is spotted and the Raiders torch the town on their way out to avoid a confrontation. The narrator informs us that this pattern continues as we move to landscapes too vertical to be Kansas. At least those parts of Kansas I’ve seen. It looks more Utah to my eye. The narrator does deliver the good news that the Cavalry has been inflicting attritional losses on the Raiders. Pursued into some forsaken corner of the west, Quantrill orders a last stand against the Cavalry, but gets dissent from the ranks as they’d rather not die pointlessly. They desert, leaving the James gang and Quantrill behind. They return to the headquarters to retrieve the only woman in the movie to find the Cavalry had trashed it and hadn’t gone very far. We get a shootout between the Cavalry and the James Gang. Quantrill is wounded in the eyes but not killed. It’s unclear what the injury was from, given the wounds shown during the treatment afterwards.
The good news keeps coming as the Gang is running low on places to hide from the Cavalry scouring the countryside for them. They find a reward poster for Quantrill at $10,000, which also applies to the James gang as members of his band. Somehow the Cavalry hasn’t yet zeroed in on the outlaws as they hunker down in a burned out farmhouse that turned out to be the first place Jesse raided with the gang. The Cavalry finally reaches them and encircles the ruin. They give the gang until dawn to turn over Quantrill before taking the location by force.
During the night, Jesse proposes an escape route for the gang but it requires leaving Quantrill behind. They do so, sneaking out and making for a creek bed to avoid line of sight from the Union positions. Once the rest of the gang is gone, Jesse opts to try to get the still-blinded Quantrill out as well. I’m not buying the characterization of Jesse from this movie. Quatrill pushes Jesse out the door and bolts himself in, fumbling to the front door where the Cavalry is waiting. He opens fire with his sidearms and is gunned down. The James Gang rides off to keep up the outlaw life and we have a dialog between Jesse and the only woman in the movie. Being sensible, she does not join the gang.
As a movie, excluding my expressed biases, it’s mediocre. If you don’t share that predilection for antipathy towards real outlaws, you could burn eighty minutes of background noise with it. I wouldn’t go out of my way to find it. I also prefer my film criminals fictional.
To be honest, this movie was kinda pointless. It doesn’t really narratively work.
I always tell people that no matter how long or how short, a true First always has a beginning, middle, and an end.
Inside of the seconder.
Keep your strange fetishes to yourself.
When he firsts at all, he always comes in last, cuz the girl don’t come at all.
/bows
“I mentioned in “The Outlaw” how I dislike the use of historical figures as characters in movies.”
Fair enough. However, an excellent movie about late-stage JJ is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
I remember liking that movie.
Audie Murphy!
I have to have seen this multiple times.
Historical accuracy was not exactly a fetish in ’50s Hollywood. I watched Sitting Bull (I think) recently and there were several “WTFSRSLY?” moments in that one.
Bad geography is a large flaw in westerns. The Ford cavalry trilogy makes no sense from where they are filmed in Monument Valley. But sometimes you gotta let some stuff go for the story.
“Jerimiah Johnson” makes very little sense since it is obviously filmed in Utah.
“The Revenant” sense of geography is horrible enough it made my teeth ache. Plus the Hugh Glass grizzly incident occurred not in the mountains but in tall grass and brush.
“The Mountain Men” was filed along the Snake River by the Teton Range. At least it was filmed in the heartland of the beaver trapping trade.
Earlier too. “Santa Fe Trail” (1940) had Jeb Stuart and George Custer buddying around in the pre-Civil War army.
I had some apoplexy over the historical inaccuracies in that one. Couldn’t finish because my copy kept shaking.
First thought on reading title: “That football team has moved again already?”
Thought after reading: Sounds as if this was a shoot-’em-up such as Hollywood churned out by the dozens in that era with some unresearched historical references in an effort to give it some cred.
😯
I didn’t even realize the sportsball team was implicated.
🤔
Didge City?
They come riding into town and threaten death and destruction if the townspeople don’t build them a stadium.
I think I found what was wrong with the nozzle cleaner. The calibration piece was being pushed out of place because the mounting screw wasn’t tight enough. Mind you this was trying to drive a screw into a free-spinning plastic component. I got it better tensioned. Hopefully this time I’ll get a good print.
😬🤞
Good luck! Let us know how the next attempt turns out!
So far no globs. No dislodged print elements. On to the second layer. I’m going to let it run.
It still reads like you’re a mad scientist casually describing your self-trans-ing machinery and the progress of your, as of yet, still ill-discharging member.
“On to the second layer. I’m going to let it run.” Good luck. Put it on high heat.
And by globs he means…
Oh, no, Ev, this is PLA, you print PLA at low heat or it gets runny.
UCS-
I just had an inspiration. You could test print a scaled-up Monopoly top hat and use it as a pen and pencil holder on your desk.
I printed out some machine covers for Mrs Kinnath for that stage. Now I’m on to multimaterial excesses.
many thanks
No problem – If I keep bumming mead off of you, it’s only fair.
😁👍
It’s a fair trade.
Wikipedia says Tony Curtis is in the cast.
I don’t think I’ve seen this one (Universal’s movies don’t show up as often), so I can’t comment further.
Bad geography is a large flaw in westerns.
That drives me crazy in anything. In Fallout they jumped around from the Bonneville Salt Flats to Santa Monica to some mountain in Colorado. On FOOT. It made me bonkers.
That’s a Joseph Smith trip.
In all movies.
The hillsides in socal are not the same as every other place in the world.
Wait, are you trying to tell me Little House was NOT filmed in Minnesota?
This got me to thinking about what I’d name as my favorite Western, and I kept coming back to Firefly. I’m sure there’s a more traditional Western I like, which I’ll remember as soon as someone else mentions it.
🤔
I’m not an expert on westerns.