“First getting shot, then gettin’ married. Bad habits.”

Drake’s rating: Needed a daughter of Frankenstein

Drake’s review: You know what they always say: You can’t watch just one Walter Hill movie. OK, granted, no one really says that. But when you have an overly mesomorphic Mutant showing up on your doorstep one day and giving you the not-so-gentle reminder that you’re behind on your reviews and really, you should think about catching up if you don’t want to be dangled off the local bridge by one foot, you just blurt out the first title you can think of so he’ll stop thumping you in the chest with a finger the size of a bratwurst.

“I’ve got The Long Riders almost done,” I stammered out between thumps. It was a lie, of course, not unlike circling YES on the Mutant Questionnaire when it asked, “Can you recite the entire sceenplay from the Sylvester Stallone classic Cobra from memory?”

I mean, I know all of Brigitte Nielsen’s lines, so it wasn’t a complete lie.

But, back to the subject at hand. The Long Riders started life as a stage production written by James Keach and produced by his brother Stacy, in which they starred as Jesse James and his brother Frank. Expanding the idea into a screenplay for a feature film, the Keaches signed another set of brothers onto the project. Robert Carradine (who was actually playing adults in the ‘70s before regressing to a teenaged college freshman several years later for Revenge of the Nerds) convinced his brothers David and Keith to play the Youngers, the three brothers who rode alongside the James Brothers and, over the course of four or five years, the project came together under director Walter Hill.

Now, hundreds of gallons of ink have been spilled on the life of Jesse James, and the film industry has been trading on the name since 1908’s The James Boys in Missouri. He’s sometimes portrayed in a heroic light, other times as the villain, and on at least one occasion met Frankenstein’s daughter. The truth is… He never met Frankenstein’s daughter. Disappointing, I know, but that was pure fabrication. Also highly fabricated were the attempts to somehow paint James as anything other than a thief and a killer out for himself. The James-Younger Gang wasn’t a band of latter-day Robin Hoods, nor were they fighting for any cause greater than that of lining their pockets with other people’s cash.

Honestly, the one redeeming feature any of them had was probably shooting at Pinkertons, those infamously anti-labor strikebreaking thugs who were hired to hunt the gang down. But I digress.

The Long Riders portrays the James and Youngers at the peak of their careers and notoriety, as well as the violent end of the gang due to an ill-advised bank robbery in Northfield, Minnesota. The story is well-told, with early criminal successes leading to the Pinkertons taking up the case and attempting to bring the gang in through their own violent and heavy-handed means. But the Pinkertons find no help in Missouri and James and Younger alike escape capture time and again.

Of course, having a pair of rather notorious factions gunning away at each other makes for poor audience engagement, so much as he did with The Warriors, Hill tilts audience sympathy towards one gang at the expense of the other. Still, it’s hard to commiserate too deeply with a violent pack of thieves, so The Long Riders lacks the poignancy of a film like Tombstone, in which friendship and brotherhood were the central tenets on which the story was built.

Here, the James-Younger Gang robs banks (and stagecoaches and trains), and the Pinkertons chase after them. Both sides try to couch their actions in idealistic overtones, but in the end they’re all just violent men trudging down a path of aggression towards their own inevitable ends. It is set apart somewhat by its environs, however, utilizing rural Georgia as a stand-in for 19th century Missouri, with green trees and dirt paths making for a diverting change from the cacti and sand of many a notable Western.

The casting of several sets of bothers (Dennis and Randy Quaid, and Nicholas and Christopher Guest all appear in the movie as well) was originally seen as a gimmick, but the notion plays second fiddle to the film as a whole. James Keach is a cold-eyed Jesse James, a man who views everyone, with the possible exception of his brother Frank, as expendable. Frank, meanwhile, as played by Stacy Keach, tends to be a bit more thoughtful. He seems to have a kinship with the Youngers that Jesse lacks, and regrets their eventual parting. But, even as the older brother, he always follows Jesse’s lead.

For their parts the Carradines are in fine form. Keith Carradine’s Jim is generally an easy-going sort, yet no less dangerous with a gun, while Bob (Robert Carradine) is a young hothead. David Carradine plays Cole Younger, the eldest brother, as quiet but unyielding, never a follower of Jesse but instead a quiet equal. He also spends more than a bit of the film chasing after a young Belle Starr (Pamela Reed, Kindergarten Cop), eventually fighting it out with her husband, Sam Starr (James Remar, The Warriors) in a nicely choreographed knife fight. It’s a solid part for David, and stands out as one of his most memorable performances.

As most Westerns do, The Long Riders leans heavily into the famous quote from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” which is honestly a legitimate approach for an old-fashioned shoot ‘em up. Besides, a few little lies here and there never hurt anyone, right?

Hmm. You’ll have to excuse me. I need to go read the script for Cobra again…

Intermission!

• None other than Stone Cold director Craig Baxley is once again on hand as stunt coordinator, so you can expect some truly impressive stunt work in this one. As is so often the case Baxley goes all-out for the grand finale, sending men flying and horses crashing through windows with abandon during the attempted Northfield robbery.
• This was the first of composer Ry Cooder’s collaborations with Walter Hill. He went on to do music for both Southern Comfort and Streets of Fire.
• The end of the James-Younger gang wasn’t the finale for the James brothers. Frightened by their near-capture in Northfield, they lived under assumed names and left Missouri. Some reports have them as far west as California, but three years later they had formed a new gang and were back to their old bad habits of robbing and killing.
• Only Frank James emerged from his outlaw years virtually unscathed. He went on to work a variety of jobs, including telegraph operator, shoe salesman and horse trainer. Those were all non-union jobs, so he never clashed with the Pinkertons again.