Thu 22 Jul 2010
Western Movie Review: THE GREAT JESSE JAMES RAID (1953).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western movies[11] Comments
THE GREAT JESSE JAMES RAID. Lippert Pictures, 1953. Willard Parker, Barbara Payton, Tom Neal, Wallace Ford, Jim Bannon, James Anderson, Richard Cutting, Barbara Woodell. Director: Reginald Le Borg.
This movie comes as the first of six in a DVD boxed set titled “Legendary Outlaws,†so it will be easy to find, if you don’t have it and you decide to go looking. Others in the set are: Renegade Girl, Return of Jesse James, Gunfire, Dalton Gang, and I Shot Billy the Kid.
I figure that Jesse James and Billy the Kid were the two men who appeared the most often in B-western motion pictures. I don’t know which one’s the more popular, if that’s the right word, but my money’s on Billy the Kid. (I suspect that maybe you could find out on IMDB, if you wanted to, but I … What the heck. There are 80 movies with Jesse James in them, and 86 with Billy the Kid. So I win!)
Getting back to film at hand, though, Willard Parker does not make a particularly convincing Jesse James. He’s too tall, too handsome, and too blond too, for that matter.
There’s no way around it. For someone who had the starring role in Tales of the Texas Rangers on TV for three years (1955-1958), he’s too stalwart, too strong, and simply too honest to play the role of a villain as if he meant it.
Strike one.
Another flaw in this film is that the ending is given away right at the beginning, when “cowardly†Bob Ford, played by Jim Bannon, comes calling one night at Mr. Howard’s house, where Jesse, his wife and son are living under assumed names. (See above.) One last job, is the deal, and Jesse falls for it. When he leaves, his wife begs him not to go, but of course he does.
Strike two.
Even though Willard Parker was decent enough as an actor, he never got the roles that would have made him a star. Not enough flair, not enough stage presence. When the real star of your western movie is Wallace Ford, playing a grizzled old-timer brought along for his skills with dynamite, sort of an Edgar Buchanan type but without the evil glint that sometimes appeared in the latter’s eye, why then, you know your budget for the film was far too low.
Well, I’ll go ahead and say it. Strike three.
Some pluses, though. Tom Neal (of Detour fame) is a nasty piece of work, and Barbara Payton (maybe the Lindsay Lohan of her day, if not even worse) is quite a dish. (She and Tom Neal may have been living together at the time.)
But why Kate is brought along to the gold mine Jesse’s crew is working their way into, is a good question. There is no raid, per se, by the way, but things do get complicated. Not in any way that makes a lot of sense, but then again, the film is in color, and the dancing girls are nice.
July 22nd, 2010 at 3:42 am
Of course that’s Joel McCrea from the radio series, not Parker from the television series on the cover of the Dell comic. [[Since fixed. See my Comment #4. –Steve.]]
I’ve seen this one and its a more than fair assessment of it, though Parker did play some good villains — notably in CARIBBEAN with John Payne where he is a sadistic overseer on cruel Francis L. Sullivan’s island plantation.
Re the Billy the Kid thing, some of those films are the Buster Crabbe Fuzzy St. John series of Billy the Kid films, which are about a different Billy the Kid than Billy Bonnie to be really picky … But as sociopathic back shooting scum go, six of one half a dozen of the other, as they say, choosing between Jesse the terrorist and Billy the ex male prostitute — I mean romantic outlaw heroes.
Actually Jesse James in his photo is a fairly good looking man, though neither Tyrone Power or Willard Parker (or Robert Wagner either) look much like him, he’s more a fleshier John Russell type.
Jim Bannon as the ‘dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard and sent poor Jesse to his grave …’, so Red Ryder back shot Jace Pearson? What would Little Beaver say? Well, being as he was Robert Blake we probably can’t print it here anyway.
And come now, you honestly can’t think of a reason for bringing Barbara Payton along to your gold mine?
At least Wallace Ford fared better here than in FREAKS and T-MEN. He seemed to specialize in memorable deaths.
Of that set the highlight is THE DALTON GANG with Don Barry and Julie Adams and THE RETURN OF JESSE JAMES with John Ireland (a shame that’s I SHOT BILLY THE KID and not Sam Fuller’s I SHOT JESSE JAMES). Both are decent B western fare. GUNFIRE is virtually the same plot as THE DALTON GANG again with Don Barry in a dual role and RENEGADE GIRL a somewhat slow female outlaw in post Civil War Missouri saga with Ann Savage and Alan Curtis.
July 22nd, 2010 at 6:40 am
I had some fun comparing this to THE GREAT NORTHFIELD MINNESOTA RAID, with Robert Duvall as Jesse, Cliff Robertson as Cole Younger and no one as Barbara Payton. Two films that might have been made in different universes!
July 22nd, 2010 at 11:28 am
I bought this set some time back. Interesting that in THE GREAT JESSE JAMES RAID they put in a scene wherein Tom Neal has a fist fight over Barbara Payton over whom he had a famous punch out of Franchot Tone a few years earlier. In the RETURN OF JESSE JAMES Reed Hadley plays Frank James having also played Jesse in I SHOT JESSE JAMES. Is he the only actor to play both of the James boys?
July 22nd, 2010 at 11:45 am
Re David’s first observation in Comment #1. You’re right. That was Joel McCrea on the first cover of the Dell comic that I posted. At 2 am this morning, my eyes must have been playing tricks on me.
I hope the one you see now is Willard Parker!
Not wishing to waste a photo, here’s the one of Joel McCrea, just as he looked on the radio:
July 22nd, 2010 at 12:10 pm
Staying with David’s Comment #1 and his statement about the Buster Crabbe “Billy the Kid” movies, most filmographies include them as authentic Billy movies, but we all know how authentic movies are.
They eventually had to change the character to Billy Carson because of the negative connotation.
Here’s a link to all of the PRC Billy the Kid/Billy Carson movies, including those made by Bob Steele:
http://www.b-westerns.com/billykid.htm
Both of the numbers I used, by the way, include TV appearances of either outlaw, which inflates each of them about equally. I don’t know if you’d include an appearance of Billy the Kid on THE RED SKELTON HOUR, but IMDB does.
July 22nd, 2010 at 12:12 pm
Well, the grizzled coots often were more memorable than the hero. Speaking of Billy the Kid cinema, PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID was almost a who’s who of the scene-stealing old-timers still alive and active at the time — Slim Pickens, Jack Elam, Chill Wills, Paul Fix, Dub Taylor.
I remember Willard Parker and Harry Lauter fondly from the old TV show. If the ads for the HAWAII FIVE-O remake are a template for remaking old shows for the iPod generation, a 2010 TALES OF THE TEXAS RANGERS would probably star Seth Rogan and Michael Cera as Jace and Clay.
July 22nd, 2010 at 3:36 pm
Walter Prescott Webb’s prize winning (and massive) history of the Rangers spawned the King Vidor movie THE TEXAS RANGERS with Fred MacMurray, Jack Oakie, and Lloyd Nolan (remade as STREETS OF LAREDO) which in turn spawned the radio series TALES OF THE TEXAS RANGERS which mixed western thrills with the modern crime investigation techniques the head of the Rangers Colonel Homer Garrison wanted to emphasize.
Willard Parker and Harry Lauter divided their careers about equally between good guys and bad guys. Harry even starred in a couple of Republic serials late in their history.
Here’s an even odder coincidence than Reed Hadley as both Jesse and Frank. John Ireland who played Jesse (or his double) in THE RETURN OF JESSE JAMES played Bob Howard in I SHOT JESSE JAMES.
I imagine the writers and directors of THE GREAT JESSE JAMES RAID shied away from the actual Northfield raid because seeing Jesse and company shot to pieces and killing civilians likely didn’t seem like a good subject for a B western of the era where Jesse was the nominal hero. Things had changed a good deal by the time of the Duvall film (he bore a close physical resemblance to Jesse too). The Dalton’s usually ended up more heroically than they really ended up too — usually because the only survivor, Emmett Dalton, was a technical adviser and producer on the films about them. Al Jennings did the same thing even managing to turn himself into a Robin Hood figure in the film about him starring Dan Duryea (though with more justification than the Daltons or James Gangs).
That said Billy has not fared as well as Jesse in historical terms. They may have romanticized Jesse, but at least they stayed within some bounds of historical accuracy in most films. Most the actors playing Billy were ten years too old (at least), often portrayed as left handed (because of that famous photo that it turns out was printed backwards), and even when they got some of the details right even more highly romanticized than Jesse.
The truth about Billy was that he started his life by taking care of the horses of customers at a house of ill repute (and doing sexual favors when they couldn’t afford the ladies inside), graduated to shooting Mexicans for fun (mostly in the back), moved up to Anglos for the Lincoln County Wars (mostly in the back though he was fast with a gun), was involved in one famous siege and one famous jail break, and finally was shot to death in his sleep by his buddy Pat Garrett, who knew he was too dangerous a psychopath to be given a fair chance, when the Wars ended and Billy refused to stop killing — he was 21 when he died — essentially a juvenile delinquent, and had killed a man for every year of his life. Garrett, novelist Eugene Manlove Rhodes, and Billy’s biographer romanticized the details in memory of their friend — and to make a better story.
He does seem to have been charismatic, but then so was Ted Bundy.
July 22nd, 2010 at 5:17 pm
I am very fond of THE LONG RIDERS.
The use of actual siblings (the Carradines, the Guests. the Quaids, the Keachs) playing historical outlaw brothers was a casting “gimmick” that was far more than a gimmick and which paid off brilliantly in acting chemistry.
And Walter Hill in his prime was a superior action director, one of the best of his generation…
July 22nd, 2010 at 6:01 pm
Rick
I agree on THE LONG RIDERS.
Fred
The only thing I can say of PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID is I don’t know who I wanted to shoot more, Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan, or Sam Peckinpah for directing the awful mess.
July 27th, 2010 at 12:31 am
[…] Parker, last mentioned on this blog for his title role in The Great Jesse James Raid [reviewed here ] is just as stalwart and upstanding as he was when he was playing Jesse James. At least he’s […]
July 28th, 2010 at 12:43 am
[…] here, Janis Carter and George Macready (in The Fighting Guardsman), and Jim Bannon was in the one I reviewed before that (in The Great Jesse James Raid). It’s like old home week here on the […]