THE TRUE STORY OF JESSE JAMES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 930, 7 June 1957, Page 17

THE TRUE STORY OF JESSE JAMES

(20th Century-Fox) G Cert. [7s more than five years since I rode with the James Brothers, but admiring the work of Nicholas Ray (and

especially his interest in the man beneath the skin of the wrongdoer and the misfit), I saddled up willingly enough when I noticed that he had directed this new film. In many ways, and itt particular as.an action story, it’s a very good film. Starting with that last, disastrous hold-up at Northfield, it chases the James boys some way into the hills; then, with the suspense still simmering, it tells their story in a sefies of flashbacks. Though I think the use of this device has been rather overdone | here, the interest doesn’t flag, and when you get back to the Northfield hold-up again and see it through from the start you'll be sitting right on the edge of your seat. The end of the James. story, too, has been well told. What made Jesse James an outlaw? the film asks. In attempting to answer it covers much ground that we’ve ridden before-the raw deal from their neighbours for their active sympathy with the South in the Civil War, and so on. In this familiar country the narrative is no doubt better than in The Great Missouti Raid, and there is some additional significant detail. The dialogue (by Walter Newman from a Nunnally Johnson screenplay) is good, the CinemaScope photography is often impressive, and the ending is a nice study in betrayal. But in spite of very competent playing by Robert Wagner as Jesse and Jeffrey Hunter as Frank, this is not really the character study in depth that I hoped Mr Ray might give us.