Summary: In the first four chapters of this series we reviewed the rise of the James brothers to the top of Kansas City’s underworld in the early years of Prohibition; their long war with the Al Capone mob and their decline in power as the Great Depression took its toll on the world; Jesse James’ assassination by a rival gangster in 1935; and Frank James’ life following his 1945 release from prison. In this last part of the series, we’ll take a look at some of the varied portrayals of the James-Younger syndicate in pop culture.

The James brothers insinuated themselves into the American pop culture matrix almost right out of the gate in their criminal careers. As early as 1920 fictionalized versions of the brothers’ exploits were being printed in the country’s most popular “true crime” magazines, in some cases almost before the film had finished developing on the crime scene photos; a 1923 silent movie about Jesse’s early days as a gang leader on the streets of Kearney played to packed audiences during its first theatrical run. In 1927 the first feature-length movie about the James brothers, a documentary titled A Family Of Scoundrels, was made under the auspices of the Treasury Department as part of a concerted effort by the federal government to counteract the glamorous image of the brothers then commonly held by the public.

Three years later, John Ford had his first bona fide big screen hit with the drama Underworld Caesar. Although set in New York City and focused on gambling dens rather than bootleg liquor, there was no doubt in critics’ or audiences’ minds that the tragic protagonists of Caesar were based on Frank and Jesse James. The gangster saga stands in dramatic contrast to the epic Westerns for which Ford would later become famous, but many of the storytelling techniques he would employ in those Westerns can be seen in early form in Caesar-- indeed, one of Caesar’s supporting players would later become Ford’s favorite actor and go on to appear in nearly every subsequent film he made. The name of the supporting player: John Wayne.

By 1937 at least nine feature-length movies about or inspired by the James-Younger syndicate had been released by Hollywood studios and three others were in the final stages of production. There were also two James brothers movies in the works by independent directors, and even children’s animation pioneer Walt Disney tried his hand at making one with a fifteen-minute cartoon short recounting the 1935 Northfield shootout. But perhaps the best-known pre-World War II motion picture to tell the James brothers’ story is the 1939 Edward G. Robinson drama The Man Who Shot Mr. Howard, a film that uses the days leading up to Bob Ford’s assassination of Jesse James as a framework to recount for the audience the dramatic rise and equally dramatic fall of the James- Younger syndicate. Mr. Howard was a hit with audiences and got almost unanimously rave reviews from critics; in spite of this overwhelmingly positive reception from the public, however, the movie had a hard time earning any respect from the Academy at Oscar time and it could manage just two nominations-- losing in both categories.

The Second World War put a temporary hold on Hollywood productions about the James brothers, but as soon as the war was over interest in their legend picked up right where it had left off. Just a month after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki MGM boss Louis B. Mayer commissioned two James-related script projects; not to be outdone, 20th Century Fox green-lighted three. Columbia Pictures for its part had no less than five scripts about the James-Younger gang in development(six if one counted the documentary film being made by Columbia’s newsreels division about Jesse James’ assassination).

But it was Paramount that ultimately prevailed in the race to get the first major postwar James brothers film to the big screen. In 1947 the studio released King Of The Bootleggers, a two hour-long saga so unabashedly violent that, in the words of one New York film critic, it “makes Scarface look like Snow White”. While to movie audiences raised on Pulp Fiction and Saw it might now seem rather tame, at the time it was first released Bootleggers was accused of being excessively gory; at least one prominent religious leader of the time denounced the film as “morally objectionable” for that reason, and more than a few major secular public figures had equally harsh words for it too. One of its own stars admitted in a Life magazine interview that Bootleggers might not be everybody’s cup of tea.

The outbreak of the Korean War and the accompanying Red Scare that gripped America in the early 1950s would have a profound impact on the next wave of James brothers-themed movies. Many directors would draw a parallel between the criminal plots of the James-Younger syndicate and the perceived threat of a Communist conspiracy Joseph McCarthy alluded to in his speeches. In fact, McCarthy himself had a front row seat to the premiere of the first major Cold War-era James brothers picture, a Warner Brothers potboiler called Elegy For A Gangster that in the eyes of some of his conservative constituents violated nearly every rule in the book except the law of gravity.

Up until at least 1960 Hollywood tended to portray the James boys as absolute evil incarnate. But as the pace of social change began to accelerate in American culture, there was a subtle yet distinct shift towards a more sympathetic image of the brothers on the silver screen as the ‘60s progressed; in the national soul searching which followed JFK’s assassination in 1963, Frank and Jesse began to be seen less as ruthless gangsters than as men pressured into the underworld by a lack of economic opportunities and an unfavorable childhood. As the Vietnam War dragged on and civil unrest tore at America’s social fabric, much of what is now referred to as “the counterculture” embraced the James brothers’ outlaw ethos; some of the more extreme elements of the ‘60s protest movement even emulated the violent tactics which the brothers had once used to fight their underworld enemies. By the time of the Tet Offensive in 1968, graffiti slogans like “Jesse lives” were being sprayed on apartment building walls and subway tunnels all over the United States. Infamous serial killer and cult leader Charles Manson often claimed to be a reincarnation of Jesse James, although police investigating his heinous crimes were more inclined to think of him as a descendant of Jack the Ripper. The 1968 independent flick Jesse and Frank portrayed the James brothers as political outlaws victimized by a cultural system bent on lining the pockets of the few at the expense of the many; the movie inspired a certain antiwar militant to publish what was euphemistically called “a self-defense handbook” that showed readers to make a kind of firebomb called a “Jesse James special”.

In the 1970s the cultural pendulum began to swing back towards the more traditional view of the James brothers as despicable gangsters-- and Hollywood shifted gears accordingly. The first major film release of that era to deal with the James gang, the 1973 Sam Peckinpah blood- and-guts epic Jesse, depicted Jesse James as a maniacal tyrant bent on turning Kansas City into either his personal fiefdom or a bullet-torn no-man’s-land. The Peckinpah film’s climactic re-enactment of Jesse’s assassination, though somewhat tame when compared to the gory material routinely cranked out by Quentin Tarantino, was considered shockingly graphic at the time it was first shown to movie audiences.

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By the time an American public fed up with the misdeeds of the Nixon Administration and the ineptitude of Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford elected Jimmy Carter as President in 1976, television had begun to pick up the pace in turning out its own depictions of the Jesse James saga. Two documentaries about the James-Younger syndicate had drawn high ratings and CBS, then the most dominant of the three main broadcast networks, was producing a miniseries about the James gang to compete with ABC’s television adaptation of the Alex Haley novel Roots. Even PBS, not exactly anyone’s idea of a hotbed of true crime programming, was trying its hand at telling the James brothers’ tale by broadcasting a TV adaptation of the one-man show The Man Who Came From Kearney.

In 1981 what might have been the most ambitious attempt by the medium up to that time to portray the James brothers’ rise and fall was aired in American viewers’ living rooms by NBC when the network broadcast the ten-part miniseries The James Brothers: Kings Of The Speakeasy. With the exception of the Dallas episode “Who Shot J.R.?” Speakeasy consistently outdid its competitors in the Nielsen ratings. It later received Emmy nominations in six categories, winning in three of those categories.

With somewhat less success, an independent TV production company made a syndicated series later in the decade based on Frank and Jesse James’ younger days growing up in Kearney. Unfortunately for the new show’s creators, American TV viewers in the pre-Sopranos era weren’t quite ready for a show with gangsters as its protagonists, and the new series folded after just ten episodes.  An equally ill-starred tabloid TV venture in the spring of 1990 made a certain investigative reporter a laughingstock after an underground vault alleged to contain a hidden stash of James-Younger syndicate loot was actually found to be totally empty when the reporter had it opened. For a while after the “Mystery of Frank and Jesse’s Vault” fiasco, TV executives were quite reluctant to have anything to do with James brothers-themed projects. The growth of cable and satellite TV, though, would fuel a revival of interest in Frank and Jesse’s life story.

The new wave of cable projects about the James brothers began in 1996 with a three-part miniseries from HBO that focused on the James- Younger syndicate’s early struggles in its quest for supremacy in the Kansas City underworld. The following year, the History Channel would air a 90-minute documentary recounting the Northfield shootout; a few months after the documentary aired A & E would score a ratings bonanza with a five-part miniseries about the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. By 1999 a dozen made-for-TV films about the James brothers had been shown on cable and two weekly shows based on-- or at least inspired by --the James gang were in production.

The most recent cinematic portrayal of the James brothers’ story, the 2006 feature film Kansas City Massacre, has been a source of much controversy from the moment it was first released to theaters. Aside from the movie’s excessive violence, which six years after its debut would lead some social commentators to cite it as a major contributing factor in the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting spree, it also drew heavy criticisms for perceived inaccuracies in its depiction of Prohibition-era Kansas City and St. Louis. Last but not least, there was an uproar over its chiefly hip-hop soundtrack, which included two tracks whose lyrics were-- to say the least --not quite fully suitable for listeners under the age of 18.

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With the 80th anniversary of the Northfield shootout less than two years away, the publishing industry is turning out books about the shooting and the James brothers almost as quickly as the bullets which flew through the air during the shootout itself. At the same time that new books on these topics are making their debut, older ones are being re-issued to meet the growing surge in reader demand for anything even slightly related to the James saga; one such re-issue, a new paperback edition of Bruce Catton’s classic biographical trilogy The Bloody Men Of Kearney, is already setting sales records on Amazon.com that put it in the same league with Harry Potter and 50 Shades Of Grey.

The house where Jesse James met his violent end has, like his boyhood home back in Missouri, become a tourist attraction for true crime buffs and history aficionados. Some people have been known to drive hundreds of miles to the house simply to take pictures of the dents in the floor where Jesse’s body landed after he fell from the impact of the four bullets fired at him. One of the bullet casings recovered from the crime scene after Jesse’s death was recently put up for auction on eBay and fetched more than $800,000 in the first two hours after it was offered for sale online. In short, the popular fascination with the James brothers and their underworld exploits is unlikely to fade away anytime soon.

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