Jesse James, the Bourgeois Bandit: The Transformation of a Popular Hero

Abstract

When Twentieth Century-Fox chose to repeat history in 1957 by resurrecting Jesse James for the second time, the studio seemed motivated by one of Marx's most famous aphorisms: if the 1939 Jesse James is tragedy, then True Story of Jesse James is farce. two versions of this famous American tale include nearly all of the same events, and yet they reveal surprisingly disparate approaches to the outlaw's life. Their dissimilarity recalls an observation made by historian Hayden White. He notes that historical situations cannot be inherently tragic, comic, romantic, or ironic: The same set of events can serve as components of a story that is tragic or comic, as the case may be, depending upon the historian's choice of the plot structure that he considers most appropriate for ordering events... into a comprehensible story.' As the twenty-ninth film to be based upon incidents involving the James-Younger gang, True Story of Jesse James (hereafter True Story) filters the life of America's most notorious bandit through the mannered self-consciousness of a work that arrives late in a narrative formula's cycle. This reflexive quality, characteristic of many postwar American films, produced an idiosyncratic variation of the James story, a conscious attack on the story's classical form. Unlike many of its predecessors, True Story is not primarily concerned with the material events in the life of Jesse James. Instead, it is more a film about the process of telling James stories and about the transformation of James into a cultural figure. It is no coincidence, therefore, that True Story claims to be based upon Nunnally Johnson's screenplay for Jesse James, and not upon historical events themselves. While it recognizes its heritage in the tradition of James stories, True Story positions itself in opposition to most previous versions by approaching the legendary tale with ironic detachment. Although its tone is not overtly comic, True Story is both a parody of previous James films and a revisionist critique of them. True Story's parodic or meta-critical intentions may be appreciated fully only by a viewer familiar both with the cycle of Jesse James films and with the James phenomenon that has unfolded simultaneously in theater, novels, radio, television, and practically every popular culture form that has come into existence since the outlaw's assassination in 1882.2 By appealing to an experienced viewer who appreciates the James story as a cultural phenomenon that exceeds this