I Shot Jesse James

After years of crime reporting, screenwriting, and authoring pulp novels, Samuel Fuller made his directorial debut with the lonesome ballad of Robert Ford (played by Red River’s John Ireland), who fatally betrayed his friend, the notorious Jesse James. At once modest and intense, I Shot Jesse James is an engrossing pocket portrait of guilt and psychological torment, and an auspicious beginning for the maverick filmmaker.
Instead of calling “Action!” Samuel Fuller discharged a Colt .45 in the air. It was the first scene he had ever directed, on the set of I Shot Jesse James (1949), and he knew the importance of a good opening. Ever the performer, Fuller was already constructing his own warrior-director legend.
Fuller knew how to handle a gun from his army days, and this experience colored all of his filmmaking, which he began at the age of thirty-six. He had dropped out of high school at seventeen, to become a crime reporter for the New York Evening Graphic, then wandered Depression-era America as a freelance reporter, wrote pulp novels, and was working as a screenwriter when World War II called him away. Once he was a civilian again, Fuller returned to his screenwriting and was shopping scripts around Hollywood when he was contacted by independent producer Robert L. Lippert, who had admired Fuller’s novel The Dark Page and hired him as a writer-director. Lippert had spent his whole career in the movie business: after building up a chain of West Coast theaters, he had started producing films of his own in 1946, joining the ranks of the Poverty Row studios. When he met Fuller, he was still producing his first cheapie westerns, but he would go on to make hundreds of B features. Fuller’s three films for Lippert would be his training ground: the budgets were minuscule, and the shooting schedules punishing, but he was given a good deal of independence, and his personality showed through immediately. Lippert nurtured the kind of passionate, dangerous moviemaking that Fuller reveled in and would build his reputation on; his rude political and racial provocations, sucker-punch cut-ins, reckless camera work, mercenary characterizations, surreally lurid dialogue—the very sort of idiosyncrasies that major studios would have rooted out while reviewing the dailies—were borne here. I Shot Jesse James offers a sympathetic portrait of Robert Ford, the James gang member who earned American boyhood’s eternal enmity by shooting the folk hero in the back. John Ireland, whom Fuller had admired in Red River (1948), plays a slow-witted if likable Ford, nursing a broken heart in the wake of his fateful shot. Marinating in self-loathing, he’s sentenced to relive the moment that defined him in the public eye, taking a stage job in which he reenacts his already mythologized assassination.
This skewed take on a legendary tale broke from the traditional moral clarity of the genre and anticipated the postwar procession of brooding “psychological” westerns (Shane, High Noon). Constant close-ups of Ford create an atmosphere of smothering anxiety; the story line hinges as much on the suppression of violence as on its release. Perhaps the most commented-upon aspect of the film is the unusual intensity of the relationship between Ford and James—in particular, in the domesticity of an eyebrow-raising bathtub scene. All of which may have been lost on Lippert, who Fuller claimed was “too uptight to even pronounce the word homosexual.” But despite this unconventionality, I Shot Jesse James was a small critical success and launched Fuller on his latest career path.