Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

I'm not sure whether I saw "The Return of Frank James" (1940) as a child. Based on a screenplay by Sam Hellman ("She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,: which also starred Henry Fonda), the movie begins with Jesse James being shot in the back by the Ford brothers (played by John Carradine and Charles Tannen), former members of the James gang. The last scene in the 1939 movie "Jesse James," directed by Henry King, was spliced in rather than recreated.

Jesse's brother Frank (Henry Fonda) had disappeared after the "great" Northfield, Minnesota raid (subject of Philip Kauffman's rathre disappointing 1972 movie, which I only recently saw) and was working a farm with a corpulent, stereotypically simple-minded, but fiercely loyal ex-slave called "Pinky" (Ernest Whitman) and a hot-blooded orphan of another member of the James gang, Clem (played by aging former child star Jackie Cooper, who had played by boy to Wallace Beery's "Champ" and was the first youngster to be nominated for a best actor ina leading role Oscar, as "Skippy").

Clem wants to ride off immediately and avenge Jesse's murder, but Frank waits for the Ford brothers to be tried for murder. They are convicted but pardoned by the governor (to the outrage of many). Then Frank has to do what's he got to do... which is repeatedly complicated by Clem, and eventually by a beautiful would-be newspaper reporter, Elearnor Stone, who was portrayed (somewhat hesitantly) by Gene Tierney in her screen debut. (Come to think of it, all three of Lang's westerns have rambunctious (more than restless) women characters: Virginia Gilmore the next year in Western Union; Marlene Dietrich in Rancho Notorious in 1952). Frank James is a reluctant scourge, not at all like Krimehilde in the second part of Lang's Die Nibelung consumed with hatred and utterly implacable: though vengeance is a recurrent concern in Lang movies, there is variety in the obsessiveness.

Other than John Ford's Sergeant Rutledge, "The Return of Frank James has the longest (in screen time) trial of any western I can remember (and I can remember two incarnations of Judge Roy Bean on screen). The trial of Frank James foreshadows those in "Boston Legal" or "Ally McBeal" for outrageous antics (the oily Yankee prosecutor played by Russell Hicks, the curmudgeonly former Confederate officer defense attorney turned local newspaper editor/publisher played by Henry Hull, and the more restrained, almost judicial former Confederate colonel slyly played by George Barabier).

There is more melodrama than action, but there are some chases and one of those stalking-through-the-horse-stable shoot-outs. And a lot of comedy, not only in the travesty of a trial, but in the Pinkerton agent played by J. Edward Bromberg, who at one point is hung up (like Dewey in the opening credits of "Malcolm in the Middle").

Fonda was becoming a major star, reprising his role in "Jesse James" (1939, in which Tyrone Power played the title character) in the same year as he played Tom Joad in John Ford's adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, and between "Jezebel" and "The Lady Eve." Lang had made Fonda a star (or provided the space for him to become one) as another sympathetic outlaw in You Only Live Once in 1937. Fonda played a victim there, and a near-victim as Frank James—who, because of Production Code rules, could not kill anyone and without being punished. This was a challenge to which Hellman rose, though this aspect has to seem odd to 21st-century viewers. (The real Frank beat many raps and was never convicted of anything, BTW. And he criticized attempts to portray his earlier self as a hero.) The two Fonda roles in Lang films both involve women persuading him to turn himself in to clear his name (results may differ.)

Like "Jesse James" and "Western Union," "The Return of Frank James" was shot in color. (This made me wonder what the first western shot in color was. The answer is "Under a Texas Moon," a 1930 western directed by the ubiquitous Michael Curtiz.) The director of photography (under a meticulous craftsman composing every shot) was George Barnes, who would win an Oscar for other work he did that year in Alfred Hitchcock's "Rebecca." (He also was nominated for an Oscar for the cinematography of "Spellbound and for six other movies).

Like many, many westerns, the exteriors were shot in Lone Pine, California (and Bishop and Sonora).

© 2006, Stephen O. Murray

The Fritz Lang writeoff remains open. Reviews of many other Lang movies are linked from its homesite, which is at http://www.epinions.com/content_165604462212.



Recommended: Yes

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12