So The Return of Frank James it had to be, what with Frank’s brother Jesse James having died at the end of his eponymous 1939 movie. No sequel featuring hotshot outlaw Jesse being possible, how about one all about his more grounded older brother, the big sell being that Henry Fonda had been persuaded to return to the role?
Boring Frank to sexy Jesse, on the face of it that’s not much of a proposition. And yet director Fritz Lang squeezes a good movie out of it, by focusing on the film’s looks. This is one of the handsomest westerns ever made. Shot in Technicolor and using locations Lang had scouted while prepping an entirely different film, Americana (which never got made), it has Lang’s eye and superb fluid skill as a director, the great outdoors and Fonda’s folksy performance as the implacable brother trying to get revenge on the Ford brothers who shot his kid brother.
Lang’s film reprises Jesse’s death in his opening scene – a bullet in the back while hanging a picture in a moment of domestic tranquility – and from here we visit the fugitive Frank toiling away on the farm where he’s hiding until the heat dies down, before he’s flushed out by the need to deal with the Ford brothers.
If you’ve seen The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, much of the early sections of the older film will be familiar, as Frank is spurred into action and then tracks down the Fords, who are now starring in a stage show about their exploits.
Frank’s attempts to travel incognito, having put out a phoney story about his own death, end up being compromised in different ways by his travelling companion, Clem (Jackie Cooper), Eleanor Stone (Gene Tierney), a “lady reporter” from the Denver Star, and George Runyan (J Edward Bromberg), a private investigator determined to get his man.
Cooper has to do a lot of gee-willickers acting in the thankless role of the young shaver; in her film debut Tierney does a lot of the emoting she’d do throughout her career; and Bromberg comes off best of the three as the private eye, his unctuous performance further proof, if any were needed, that the film is entirely on Frank’s side.
He kills no-one, robs only when he absolutely has to and is otherwise the honourable upstanding citizen. Members of the James family, including Frank’s widow, were still alive when this film was being made so there’s a certain amount of tip-toeing around the legend (the suggested romance with Eleanor Stone never goes anywhere, for instance), leaving Fonda with not much to work with apart from dignified poses. But Fonda is to dignified poses what Tierney is to breast-heaving – he’s fine in the role, though really there is no role, barely a character.
After You Only Live Once Fonda had vowed never to work with Lang again, but the two were thrown together by Fox’s late decision to give the film to Lang, with Fonda already part of the package.
On his first western, and being a German to boot (there was a war on), Lang seems determined to give it his best shot, depicting the farm, the frontier town, the saloon, the newspaper office, the courtroom as beacons of American civilisation in a dangerous world. There’s less studio work than usual for the time – Lang gets out onto location when he can, and his horse chases are breathless and beautiful, across landscapes that are the same. One shot, of a steam train pulling into a station at twilight, is so gorgeous you might want to screenshot it.
Really, it’s a triumph of craft over plot. Not an awful lot happens but it looks spectacularly good, in spite of a Technicolor image that seems to have lightened over time. Is there a restoration somewhere in the works, and if not, why not?
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
