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The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (Movie Review)

While Linden was off at Art Melbourne where she has some work in the Ballan and Pannan Gallery area it was my duty to stay behind and look after the doggies. So I rented a couple of videos, one of which was The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford co-produced and starring Brad Pitt with a cameo late in the movie by Nick Cave. I have to admit I’ve grown up on movies of the James Gang as recent as the 1990’s which showed them as a roaring bunch of ride in and rob a bank villains. What I really liked about this version was the historical narrative and the human complexity of the story.

You can hate Robert Ford and you can pity him. Just like you can sympathise with Jesse James and also see him as a back shooting murderer when it came to the crunch. Romance aside, in their day it was the underworld crime of the era.

What surprised me was that I never knew he’d been assassinated by what by all accounts would be described as a stalker. Robert Ford was obsessive about Jesse James from an early age and appears to have had a severe personality disorder of some kind. Which brings me to something I personally took away from the movie about choosing the wrong heroes in life. But then, given the time and social situation of Robert Ford could he have been anything other than a cohort of the James Gang?

If you haven’t seen the movie I’m not going to tell you where Nick Cave turns up in it or the fate of the coward Robert Ford. But I will point out that he’s forgotten. Nobody is singing songs about Robert Ford or putting his picture over their fireplace. He’s just the guy who backshot a legendary figure. Its an example how young men believe they’ll be famous for something only to find that the world never reacts the way you expected.

One of the great movies of recent years, for sure.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 1:37 pm and is filed under movies, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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2 Responses to “The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (Movie Review)”

  1. Eric

    April 19th, 2008 at 11:46 pm

    The family of Jesse James have posted their own 5 page review of this movie on their family web site, together with stories about the James family’s former experiences with Hollywood and Jesse James movies.

    http://www.ericjames.org/Reviews/AssassinationofJesseJames/index.html

  2. steven

    April 20th, 2008 at 9:54 am

    Eric, thanks for the link I’ll have a bit more of a read of it over the weekend.

    By the way, in passing, Google would be having trouble with knowing much about your site. It looks like every page is an image map without even alt attributes. If you made it more accessible to Google you would improve your traffic and potential exposure.

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