THE RETURN OF FRANK JAMES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 91, 21 March 1941, Page 16

THE RETURN OF FRANK JAMES

(20th Century-Fox)

A§ you will recall, if you saw the first picture, Jesse James had a brother named Frank, who now returns in full technicolour to take it out of

the hides of those Ford boys for shooting Jesse so treacherously in the back and the last scene. Though the pace is rather more leisurely, this second instalment of the James Brothers’ saga just about maintains the high standard of exciting violence set by the first; and Frank, plain or coloured, turns out to be quite as good a man as his brother when it comes to robbing a bank and pulling a gun. From an acting point of view, he is a very much better man, since Henry Fonda as Frank James now gets the limelight which, in the first picture, fell on Tyrone Power as Jesse, and Fonda is much more capable of taking advantage of it. Like some other nations, the Americans seem to have a fondness for turning their "bad men" into national heroes. They forgot the black side of Jesse James’s banditry as soon as he was dead,

glorified his daring exploits, and put a tombstone over him which commemorated only that he had been " foully murdered." What happened historically to Brother Frank I don’t know; but Hollywood here sees to it that he is acquitted with honour by a jury, applauded by the public for taking vengeance on the cowardly Fords, and left well on the way to marrying a newspaper proprietor’s daughter. After all this, one begins to wonder if Australia has been unnecessarily hard on Ned Kelly. Still, it is worth noting that Hollywood is at some pains to suggest that Frank James never actually shot any men himself but merely "encouraged" their deaths, and that he robbed a bank only because he needed money to avenge his brother. The price he must pay for this whitewashed crime-sheet is that he is likely to be remembered as one of the worst marksmen in movie history. Guns are blazing all through the picture but practically nobody gets hit except by accident! You’d never think there was a war on, the way the actors waste ammunition. After he comes out. of retirement.on his farm in the opening scenes to track

down his brother’s murderers, and before his Hollywood apotheosis is complete, Frank James has a pretty strenuous time, what with dodging several necking parties, keeping a fatherly eye on young Jackie Cooper, and trying to prevent his decent human feelings (such as falling in love) from getting the better of his lust for revenge. I feel there is something wrong about this business of holding such a man up as a hero, but it is a well-tried and popular movie formula, and there is no doubt that Director Fritz Lang has got plenty of suspense and action out of it in The Return of Frank James. Lang knows the value of silence in building up a tense atmosphere; some of his best bits of man-hunting are done without a sound. He also extracts much uproarious comedy from the sequence in which Frank, on trial before a Southern judge and jury, is found not guilty of murder and robbery because the prosecuting lawyer is guilty of being a Northerner. In addition to Fonda as the laconic, purposeful Frank, most of the leading actors ably carry on the parts which they played in Jesse James-John Carradine as the skulking Ford, Eddie Collins as the negro "Pinkie," and, best of all, Henry Hull as the fire-eating Southern editor (" Shoot ’em down like dogs").