THE GREAT MISSOURI RAID

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 649, 7 December 1951, Page 21

THE GREAT MISSOURI RAID

(Paramount) EN The Great Missouri Raid opens Jesse James (Macdonald Carey) and his brother Frank (Wendell Carey) are members of a Confederate bushwhacker (guerrilla) party in Missouri during the Civil War. The first significant action shots are the most shocking in the film. With a rope round his neck, Doctor Samuels (Edgar Buchanan) is being» threatened with hanging by a party of Union soldiers if he doesn’t reveal Jesse’s whereabouts; Mrs. Samuels (Anne Revere) appears with a gun; Jesse is found and lashed with a rope-end-we are shown (in Technicolor) his bloody back. When Frank arrives with» the bushwhackers there is a battle in which Jesse shoots a bluecoat. The dead, man’s brother, Major Trowbridge (Ward Bond) is the officer who must give the bushwhackers their parole when the war ends, and not relishing this he has little trouble in arranging an ambush when they ride in to surrender. The James brothers and their associates become outlaws because they aren’t given a chance to be anything better, and at home old Doc Samuels and his wife have one long wait for the worst, which frequently happens. I don’t know how much of The Great Missouri Raid is fact, or whether there’s general agreement about the facts of the James story. In any case, the film shows what can (and sometimes does) follow a failure to forgive or a denial of legal rights to those we don’t like. (It also shows the likely end of a life outside the law.) I seem to remember that someone made out a somewhat similar case for the Kellys in Australia, in, Stead’s Review a good many years a The Great Missouri Raid (directed by Gordon Douglas) isn’t an outstanding film, though some scenes from it have stayed in my mind. But I found in it, and liked, a certain biographical, documentary quality, This builds up

from the start, with its series of pofttraits of the bitter, weather-beaten principals, and there is no disguising the fact that the worst will happen before the lights go up. The plot runs on in a quite uncomplicated way from incident to incident, leading to the big railway hold-up. This same documentary quality also, of course, makes the | film rather more grim, the scenes of violence more real and terrible, than they might otherwise seem.