Reel History 13: The Death of Jesse James

When Jesse James was shot by Robert Ford on April 3, 1882, he was already a massive celebrity. America's love affair with Prohibition and Depression-era criminals- Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Al Capone- paled in comparison to its love for the James gang, who became out-and-out heroes among Confederates still holding on to whatever revenge fantasy they could grasp in the Reconstruction era; it helped that James was a former member of Quantrill's Raiders in Missouri (see Ride with the Devil), and that he appealed to his fellow Southerners in his letters to the media and by using Ku Klux Klan imagery in his robberies. James' legacy paints him as an American Robin Hood, robbing the rich and giving to the poor in dime store novels and folk tales, and it's a success in neo-Confederate propaganda.

But after killing James, Robert Ford had a rare opportunity not given to all assassins- going free and making money off his actions. Ford took what he could get and ran, capitalizing on the public's craving to see how the murder happened, and, not unlike his victim, parlayed his infamy into wealth. But even that can only take you so far.

Sam Fuller's first movie, I Shot Jesse James (1949), tells that story with a pretty liberal interpretation of what happened. It's a pretty standard Western, though it's mostly about the aftermath of Robert Ford's shooting of James than of James' life. James, now living in his hometown of St. Joseph, Missouri under the guise of Thomas Howard, was shot in the back of the head by Ford while dusting and straightening a picture on his wall. In I Shot, James is portrayed as a pastoral, quiet man, trying to leave his legacy behind and live a domestic life with his wife and children. Ford, of course, is a coward (see the title of the next movie), shooting his best friend and confidante so he could also leave the James legacy behind and live a quiet life with his fiance. This, I suppose, is a noble goal, especially since James was a cold-blooded killer wanted by the law, but Fuller doesn't hesitate to turn Ford into a crazy unhinged man. He has to wrestle with his conscience following the shooting, and the fame of being the man who killed the most notorious outlaw in the country doesn't mean much when that notorious outlaw happens to be a beloved folk hero.

Fuller fudges the details to create conflict, because hey, it's a cheap 8o minute Western where the most famous character gets shot in the first 10 minutes, you have to pad it with something. In the movie, Ford shoots James so he can earn the reward and move away with his fiance, who happens to have another suitor, a more dignified suitor at that. This rival is none other than Edward O'Kelley, the real-life murderer of Robert Ford, who shot him in the back in Ford's Creede, Colorado tent saloon in 1892. In the movie, O'Kelley is forced to shoot the drunken, deranged Ford, who is driven by jealousy to kill him first. In real life, O'Kelley gave no real motivation following his apprehension; it was suggested that he was driven by the same craving for notoriety as Ford, shooting Jesse James' killer as a quick way to heroism. 

Now, the same story was tackled in a movie that was twice as long as I Shot, and my goodness, it's just a better movie all around; even at almost three hours, it's never boring, unlike I Shot. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a beautiful, ethereal film, and a cautionary tale about meeting your idols, or maybe it's a good example of why you should kill them (with all due respect to Sonic Youth, of course). The movie came out in 2007 as part of an odd wave of unconventional Westerns, alongside There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. I think it stands alongside those two as a modern classic.

It's different from I Shot in many ways, first and foremost in that it's actually a great movie, but also because it skews more to the actual story of James' life. Ford isn't driven by jealousy to kill James, he's driven by a craving for fame. He worships the James gang, and wants nothing more than to be part of the group that entertained him as a child. When he finally gains access to James' inner circle, and sees his hero for who he really is, he's taken aback; this is Jesse James? Assassination portrays James as unhinged, driven mad by the man-hunt. When Ford finally shoots him, James accepts it as inevitable. He doesn't give two craps about how the picture is hung, he just wants it to be over. He knows the walls are closing in, knows that the Ford brothers, the two people he could finally trust, have given themselves over to the other side. These motivations may or may not be true, of course, but taking a creative look at what you can't know (what they were thinking) is a lot better and more challenging than taking a creative look at what you do know (the actual course of events).

Both movies include similar details: the shooting, of course, but also that Robert Ford and his brother Charley re-created the assassination on stage for a paying audience in a touring show, a wandering minstrel singing an insulting song right in front of Ford (played in Assassination by Nick Cave, who also wrote the haunting score). But I Shot downplays the Ford brothers' show, making it seem like Robert gave up after the first show because of his conscience; he actually played the role of himself a lot, though it wasn't well received and showed the public how the murder was actually cheap and cowardly. 

Why Assassination works so well for me is that it actually makes Jesse James a character in the story of his murder, and it's not at all sympathetic. Brad Pitt (playing James) and Casey Affleck (playing Ford) give incredibly nuanced performances, and the story is complex enough so that the audience isn't forced to choose between the two. Fuller, on the other hand, barely features the outlaw in his movie at all, so that all we know about him is what knowledge we already knew, and thus James' legacy as a righteous bank robber is kept intact. But Jesse James wasn't a good person. There's no evidence he gave his ill-gotten gains to the poor, and his robberies ended with murder and often targeted Union-sympathizers or ex-soldiers. He was a brutal man leading a brutal group of people- one robbery in 1876 saw the gang crack the skull of the cashier and hold a knife to his throat in an attempt to get the combination to the safe; they were unsuccessful, and when the authorities were called and on their way one of the James gang shot the cashier as they made their escape.

This ex-Confederate soldier gets sympathy/praise in the same way ex-Confederates are sympathized with/praised in so many Westerns- he represented a cool, anti-authoritarian position in the lawless West, sticking it to the government trying to hold him down. Unfortunately, the people he represented were Lost Causers living vicariously through outlaws just as evil as they, only bolder and better with a gun. James doesn't deserve his legacy, and I think Assassination gets that.

Reel History 12: Glory and Ride with the Devil- black soldiers and the Civil War

Oh dear. I was dreading getting to 1861. Or, seeing as I've already gone past it in Gangs of New York and in the life of Abraham Lincoln, having to backtrack and do something definitive about that darn Civil War.

The Civil War, to put it mildly, is the defining moment in American history, which makes it a complex and overwhelming topic to tackle in a blog about movies. You can experience it in relatively straightforward movies such as Gettysburg, Gone With the Wind, and Cold Mountain; or you can take the lighthearted approach and see the Confederate pratfalls of Buster Keaton's The General. Civil War movies are vast because they don't just recount events, they use the war as a thematic background, so you're going to get a lot of variety.

Quick rundown, then: Lincoln is elected; southern states secede in 1860-61 fearing he'll roll over their rights as states to own people like cattle; the Confederate States of America destroy Fort Sumter, bombastically declaring war; bloody battles fought back and forth until the CSA surrenders in 1865. If you want more details, you'll have to read books (it's really interesting! I promise) or try and glean something from my past posts, but in the meantime, just know this: before the war, it was "the United States are..."; after, "the United States is..." Now the relationship between the states and the federal government is clear(er). Black people are STILL not fully considered people though, even in the northern states; many Union soldiers didn't think they were fighting to free 'the coloreds' until well into the war.

But hey, a lot of progress is made for the black population during the war, even if some of it is just gaining the ability to fight in a war. In March 1863, three months after the Emancipation Proclamation came into effect, the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry was formed by the governor of the state. The regiment was one of the first African American units in the Union Army, and it saw extensive action in the American Civil War. Commanded by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (who was white, as Secretary of War Edward Stanton did not trust black people to lead their own units), they fought all over the country, ending their time at the Battle of Boykin's Mill in April 1865, one of the last battles in the war.

The 1989 film Glory tells the bittersweet tale of the 54th, with the oddly cast Matthew Broderick playing the role of Shaw. It's bittersweet because, and here's a spoiler even though it's a 24 year-old movie about a real historical event (I didn't know the outcome either), almost half of the 54th, including Shaw, were killed in a siege on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, on July 23, 1863. The 'sweet' of this event was that after the valour was recognized, it increased enlistment and use of African-American troops, something President Lincoln recognized as helping end the conflict.

This all was happening, appropriately enough, during the great New York draft/race riots as documented in the last half hour of Gangs of New York, and this dichotomy highlights the hardships of living as a black person anywhere in the United States, even in the north.

Glory is about as good a movie about the Civil War as one could get, and it's consistently praised for it's accuracy and the lack of forced stirring moments (they exist, but they're played rather well). What's unfortunate is that this is yet another film about the black experience in America that is told from the perspective of a white man. I know Shaw is an important part of the 54th's history, but there are other perspectives that could have been taken- either Denzel Washington or Morgan Freeman, for example, could have been the focus, as both are important and much more interesting characters. Washington even won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor; maybe it could have been upgraded to Best Actor.

Ang Lee's Ride with the Devil has a much different focus than that of Glory, in that the protagonists are Confederates (or the Missouri equivalents, known as Bushwackers) and they are fighting the anti-slavery, pro-Union Kansas Jayhawkers (who are coming over the border to fight, as Missouri is a slave state). So these are people not normally associated with 'good guys'. This of course makes it a much more complex movie, and it doesn't always work, but Ang Lee's style definitely makes the movie worthwhile.

In Ride with the Devil, Tobey Maguire joins a group of Bushwackers as they seek vengeance on raiding Jayhawkers; one of the gang just so happens to be a black man named Holt (played by Jeffrey Wright) who fights loyally alongside his former owner. Maguire's relationship with Holt is but one of the many complex relationships in the movie (the relationship with Jewel, for instance, takes up much of the latter half of the movie), and thus Ride overextends itself into boredom, but it's still a lovely film.

But Holt's motives in the movie are complicated, and he feels loyal to the Bushwackers (and Quantrill's Raiders, the infamous Confederate guerilla group with whom he and MacGuire end up joining) despite their motives being opposite to his well-being. You can see the pain in his eyes briefly when the Raiders are stacking up the bodies of black men after their massacre at Lawrence, Kansas. So, why'd he stay?

It's an excuse you here from Southern apologists all the time: black men fought to protect the South's right to secede, so the Civil War wasn't about slavery! It's kind of true, at least the first part- a couple thousand slaves did indeed fight for the Confederate Army, as they were allowed to fight as part of a last ditch effort to win the war in 1865.

The Confederates forced them, of course, because these weren't free men fighting for what they saw was right; Holt's motivations in Ride aren't political, but myopically personal. His former owner, George Clyde, goes out on a limb to defend Holt, saying he's one of the few men he'd trust with his life. I doubt Clyde would feel the same way about any other black man he'd come across, especially not if these black men fought for the Union. The 54th, like all black regiments, were under threat of execution if captured; Jefferson Davis proclaimed in December of 1862 that any captured black soldiers or their white officers were to be sentenced to death.

By the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men (10% of the Union Army) served as soldiers in the U.S. Army and another 19,000 served in the Navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war—30,000 of infection or disease. 16 were awarded the Medal of Honor. But let's not forget the slaves who were forced to fight against their best interests- unlike their white fellow soldiers, they had little choice or stake in the matter.

NEXT TIME: Looking at Walker, a BIZARRE and oft-forgotten chapter of American colonialism, and then we catch up with an ex-Quantrill Raider and see what he's up to (hint: he's a famous bank robber!).

A recruitment broadside for black men in the north. Unfortunately, those who signed up were paid less than their white counterparts ($10 a month compared to $16 a month), and had to buy their own uniforms (as opposed to white soldiers, who were given a $3.50 clothing allowance).

Sources:

http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/blacks-civil-war/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/54th_Massachusetts_Volunteer_Infantry

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/confederacy-approves-black-soldiers