Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Reginald Le Borg
• Written by Richard H. Landau
• Starring
  • Willard Parker
  • Barbara Payton
  • Tom Neal
  • Wallace Ford
  • Jim Bannon
• Produced by Robert Lippert Jr.

There’s probably no American historical figure who spans more of a divide between fact and folklore than Jesse James. Jesse and Frank James got their start as guerrilla raiders for the South during the Civil War and went on afterward to a life of bank and stagecoach robbery at the head of several iterations of their gang. After a ten-year streak of good luck from 1866 to 1876, they found themselves hampered by gang turnover (too many of them caught bullets) until 1882, when Robert Ford, himself a member of the gang, decided that killing Jesse for the bounty made more sense than continuing their escapades. Jesse James was 34 years old.

Thanks to the continuing resentment in the South after the Civil War, James was hailed not as a common criminal but as a symbol of indomitable South’s-gonna-rise-again spirit and a frontier “Robin Hood,” even though he always left out that “give to the poor” part after robbing the rich. Dime novels filled with fanciful versions of his exploits were popular even when he was still alive, and upon his death he became the subject of a full-fledged martyr’s mythology. Jesse James the murderous bank robber had become in the public mind Jesse James the champion of the oppressed and symbol of the fading frontier. America wouldn’t mythologize its contemporary criminal element to the same degree until the days of Bonnie and Clyde.

“And this must be the little lady. Narf!”

The Great Jesse James Raid plays fast and loose with the facts. It’s supposed to have occurred sometime after 1875, when Jesse and his wife Zee had had Jesse Jr. and settled back in Missouri. Jesse (here played by Willard Parker) lives under the assumed name of “Tom Howard,” trying to forget his past life and live as normally as he can, though tortured by the fact that he can’t tell his son his own real name. (The trope of the older outlaw trying to stay retired is helped by the fact that Parker, 41 the year this was shot, looks at least ten years older; it probably wouldn’t have played so well if the role had gone to an actor as young and baby-faced as the real Jesse had been.) But Jesse is tracked down by former associate Robert Ford (Jim Bannon, a former “Red Ryder”), whose role in the mythology should be known even to modern audiences, if only from the title of the Brad Pitt movie from a few years back. Ford, in company with former miner Sam Wells (Richard Cutting), have come to Jesse with a business proposal: a gold mine heist. Sam knows of older tunnels dug by former claim workers at the gold mine site, and all that stands between them and a stockpile of $300,000 worth of gold dust is Jesse and the posse he can assemble: a gunslinger, a powder man, and a driver.

Jesse hems and haws about wanting to go straight, but he also wants to provide some security for his family, and anyway it would be a short movie if he listened to Zee’s pleas, so he leaves in the morning to start assembling his team:

“I never wanted to be an outlaw! I always wanted to be — a lumberjack!”

- Arch Clements (Tom Neal), gunslinger and jerk. How much of a jerk? Jesse springs him from a local lockup by holding a gun on the sheriff; once Arch is free, he shoots the old sheriff just for spite.

- Elias Hobbs (Wallace Ford), powder man. Since he’s older and an expert on dynamite, Hobbs is given every cliched mannerism of the grizzled prospector character: he’s fuzzy-faced, he drinks whenever he can, his hat is bent up at the front, and he talks in biblical allusions like an old-time preacher.

Hobbs taking in the Colorado scenery.

-Johnny Dorette (James Anderson), son of the man Jesse had actually wanted to recruit as the team driver. Dad had just that morning been hanged for some horse thievery that he hadn’t committed, so Jesse, Arch and Hobbs help him take vengeance on the men who set his father up and want to drive him off his land. And then they’re on their way!

Once in Colorado, they ride to the saloon that Ford owns in the mining town and meet their further complication: Kate (Barbara Payton of Bride of the Gorilla (1951)), worldly-wise saloon singer and Ford’s “special friend.” Arch immediately makes a jerk of himself with her, and cleancut Johnny steps up to defend her. The love triangle thus established (love rectangle, really, counting Ford) never becomes the mainspring of the plot, but it does help to fill time. (Oddly enough, Tom Neal, who played Arch, was reputedly a bona fide jerk in real life; even more oddly, Barbara Payton was his real-life on-and-off girlfriend at the time.)

“Now, I’m trying to describe a three-dimensional layout with only a two-dimensional visual aid, so you’re gonna have to use your imaginations…”

Ford sets them to work blowing and cleaning out the old collapsed shaft on the other side of the mountain from the present mine, but it soon becomes apparent that he’s working a double-cross with Sam, largely because he’s Bob Ford and that’s what he’s supposed to do; he plans to have Jesse’s posse do all of the hard work, after which another gang of hirelings will shoot Jesse down and collect the $10,000 bounty on him – which is still cheaper than the fourth of the $300,000 that Ford had promised Jesse.

It would strain one’s willing disbelief in liberties taken with the historical record for this movie to conclude with Jesse making it away with his share of the gold. However, this is not the tale of Jesse James’ death at the hands of Robert Ford, so not only do Jesse and Ford have to be alive at the end of the movie, but Jesse has to not suspect Ford of setting him up, or else he never would have allowed Ford to stand behind him with a loaded gun in April of 1882. The movie therefore functions as a prequel of sorts, and as such it suffers from prequelitis; after all, the audience already knows from the beginning the status quo at the end of the movie, and which characters must necessarily survive.

“Well, hello there. I’m a jerk. Perhaps you’ve heard of me.”

Like most features produced by Robert Lippert, it’s a competent little production, but a competent little production. As the bottom half of a double-bill, The Great Jesse James Raid would have made acceptable filler, but it’s too weak to be much of an attraction on its own.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 15
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 4
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• springloaded rabbits: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0