Young Jesse James (1960) User Reviews

Those Quantrill Days

[bkoganbing · 5/10 · 28 July 2019]

This film is another retelling of the Jesse James saga or at least the beginning of it as a teenage Jesse joins Quantrill's Raiders where brother Frank already is. His father was lynched by Missouri redlegs which was a Union based guerilla outfit just like Quantrill was for the Confederacy. To be sure there were regular troops for both sides in that state, but there was also this private war that both sides had as well.

Ray Stricklyn plays a callow Jesse with Robert Dix as Frank and Willard Parker as Cole Younger. It's been suggested Cole Younger was the real brains in the future James-Younger gang and Parker certainly portrays Cole that way.

Stricklyn and Jacklyn O'Donnell as Zerelda James make a tender pair of frontier lovers. Merry Anders makes a brief but telling appearance as Belle Starr and Emile Meyer is Quantrill.

Best scene in the film is Jesse's baptism of fire as he's sent to the town in drag on a bit of espionage and has to be rescued.

This is a neat no frills B western.

The Ziegfeld Follies of western outlaw get-togethers.

[mark.waltz · 5/10 · 4 December 2023]

If this had been made at MGM, they could have billed it as "more outlaws than there are in the heavens", what with Jesse and Frank James, Cole Younger and his brothers and Belle Starr present. I've seen individual movies on each of these families or individuals, and don't recall them together. Ray Stricklyn is even prettier than Tyrone Power was, and indeed passes as a woman when he's disguised in a long dress and bonnet, part of a robbery led by Willard Parker's Cole.

Bombshell Merry Anders makes a buxom but far too modern looking Belle, but does a good job. Jacklyn O'Donnell is a platinum blonde future Mrs. Jesse James, far too dainty for the life she's getting into. Emile Meyer, as the head of the Quadrille Squadron, is a good foe for these criminals. Not much different than "Return of the Bad Men" or "The Younger Brothers" from over ten years before, so this seems a bit too late for a higher budgeted B since the end of the poverty row programmer Saturday matinee was pretty much a thing of the past. Decent low budget production values but not any more violent than others, although one man shot in the head gets a shocking close-up.

Well-told low-budget western with a harder edge than usual

[BrianDanaCamp · 15 November 2008]

I had seen YOUNG JESSE JAMES (1960) in a theater when I was a child so I was a bit surprised when, watching it again for the first time earlier this year on the Fox Movie Channel, the rating of "TV 14 LV" appeared, presumably for "language" and "violence," which puzzled me since the film was a low-budget black-&-white western that originally played to a kid audience at a time when TV westerns were all the rage. Well, the film turned out to have a lot more violence than I'd remembered, including a bloody shot to the head, a couple of knifings, some cold-blooded shootings, and an attempted rape. Overall, it held up surprisingly well. Granted, it was all shot on the 20th Century Fox backlot or nearby ranches, on a very low budget, but it offered a pretty good overview of the young outlaw's early exploits. While from a production standpoint it can't compare with Fox's 1939 Technicolor version with Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda, its storyline actually hews a little closer to the historical record than the earlier film's aggressive whitewash of the James saga. It even includes the bit where Jesse is employed by Quantrill to dress up as a girl to fool Union soldiers.

The bulk of the film focuses on Jesse's period with guerrilla leader William Quantrill, whom he joins as a teenager in order to be with his brother Frank after their father had been hung to death by Union soldiers (a bit of fudging here, since in real life it was Jesse's stepfather who was hung--by Missouri militiamen, not soldiers--but not fatally, only to get him to tell where Frank and his men were hiding). Jesse's subsequent chief aim, according to the script, is to avenge the death of his father. Also in Quantrill's camp is Jesse's older cousin, Cole Younger, another famous western outlaw, although he was not actually Jesse's cousin in real life. Younger has a hard time with Jesse's hot temper, impulsive behavior and increasing taste for killing. Complicating matters is another loose cannon in Quantrill's camp, Zack (Rex Holman), a cretinous redneck with a knife who loves to kill "Redlegs" (their preferred term for Yankees) and chase women when he can. When he attempts to rape Jesse's girlfriend, who's come to the camp to see Jesse, it leads to more violence. After the war, Cole reluctantly allows Jesse into his outlaw gang, but only because Frank James insists on it.

Ray Stricklyn is somewhat overwrought as Jesse in the early scenes, too intent on "acting" to allow himself to inhabit his character the way the rest of the cast, most of them old hands, do. At one point he has a dramatic scene with his girlfriend Zee (Jacklyn O'Donnell) after he's left Quantrill. "I didn't leave the war behind, I brought it home with me," he declares to her. While it might be a highly unlikely line for the somewhat less-than-self-reflective Jesse to utter, it's interesting for the way it foreshadows similar sentiments uttered by Vietnam War vets in movies a few short years afterwards. (I was surprised to learn, upon checking IMDb's bio for Stricklyn, that he was 31 when he made this film, almost twice the age of the character.) Stricklyn gets better as it goes along, particularly as he gets meaner and more obnoxious, increasingly disliked by those around him. The film takes pains not to glorify or glamorize Jesse. Of course, since the film ends at the beginning of his postwar outlaw career, he is never shown suffering the consequences of his misdeeds, possibly a first for a Hollywood film about a major historical outlaw.

Veteran actor Willard Parker plays Cole Younger as a mature character who starts out as a sincere believer in the Rebel cause but becomes disillusioned and walks out on Quantrill. Robert Dix (a dead ringer for his father Richard Dix, a 1930s matinée idol and onetime western star) does a good job as Frank James. Emile Meyer practically steals the show as the irascible Quantrill, who takes a shine to Jesse's sheer nerve and skill with a pistol. Merry Anders turns up as another famous outlaw, Belle Starr, who, widowed after the death of Sam Bass, takes in Cole and Jesse for a night and winds up bedding Cole. It's a small, showy role but it got her third billing in the cast list, after Stricklyn and Parker. Rayford Barnes plays Pitts, a Quantrill crew member who befriends Jesse and later joins Cole's outlaw gang. Barnes would later turn up as Buck, an ill-fated member of THE WILD BUNCH (1969).

Young Jesse in Drag-briefly

[bengleson · 3/10 · 29 September 2007]

I like to think I am an appreciative viewer, one drawn to a range of films. This effort starts off in typically abusive scene fashion and creates the thematic need for revenge. From then on, it rumbles into trite pap. Now pap can be entertaining and *slight spoiler alert* the image of a young Jesse James decked out in a dress and head gear is worth some of my time. And perhaps yours. I'm not sure if this flick is revisionist history (because I actually caught it on Canada's History Channel) which either gives it a credibility beyond reason or the programmers at the History Channel are so consumed by humor that the joke outweighed any common sense or talent they might have. Anyways. the lovely Merry Anders does a turn as Belle Starr and the fierce Emile Meyer absorbs the role of Quantrill. All in all, a wet Saturday afternoon diversion. Who could ask for more?

Semi- hstorical account of Jesse and associates, mostly leading up to the Younger-James gang.

[weezeralfalfa · 7/10 · 17 July 2018]

In some respects, treated like a B western. But, I thought it was rather good. 1960 was rather late to be filming in B&W. Also, truncated B westerns were mostly a thing of the past. But, both apply to this film. It deals mostly with the period before the formation of the Younger-James gang. Expect many deviations from the literal historical record. For example, Jesse's stepfather didn't die from a lynching. Rather he was subjected to a semi-lynching, probably to scare him. He did, at this time have a sweetheaart knicknamed Zee, who was his cousin. However, she didn't marry him during this period. Rather, they waited 9 years to officially tie the knot! Perhaps, because Zee didn't want to marry him as an outlaw. Guess she finally changed her mind........A true incident is dramatized in the shooting of Jesse by a union soldier, when he came to officially surrender, at war's end. The soldier explained that he recognized Jesse as a member of Quantrill's raiders, and thus deserved to die. Although Quantrill is the only guerilla leader dramatized as associated with the James, in fact, they sometimes road with 'Bloody Bill' Anderson, or Archie Clement.......Rex Holman is cast as the hothead Zack: a member of Quantrill's raiders. He and Jesse have their occasional quarrels, but Zack saves Jesse's life. But, then, Zack tries to rape Zee in the open, so Jessie shoots him.......Cole Younger also plays a significant part in the film, as Jesse's older kin. He has a romantic thing going with the widowed Belle Starr(Merry Anders), who also dabbles in outlawry. Later, when he wanted to form an outlaw gang, he wanted to exclude Jessie, but Frank refused to join if Jessie was excluded.......You can see it at YouTube

Not bad little western

[searchanddestroy-1 · 17 January 2023]

First, let me say that I am glad to have purchased this movie in LBX frame, and not a f...pan and scan one. Very rare for those Lippert - Regal - or API Productions, grade B movies distributed by Twentieth Century Fox. Not a great film but fairly good enough to be catched if you can. It tells the early Jesse James adventures, as you also had westerns telling the equivalent for Billy The Kid. William Claxton the director was a little western specialist and his talent is obvious here. It is well paced, well told, never boring, no length, the perfect little B western. And, I repeat, the LBX frame is helpful to appreciate it.