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The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) 
 
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068661/

The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid is a 1972 Technicolor Western film about the James-Younger Gang distributed by Universal Pictures. It was directed by Philip Kaufman in a cinéma vérité style and starred Cliff Robertson as Cole Younger, Robert Duvall as Jesse James, Luke Askew as Jim Younger, R. G. Armstrong as Clell Miller, John Pearce as Frank James, and Matt Clark as Bob Younger. The film recreates the James-Younger Gang's most infamous escapade: the September 7, 1876, robbery of the biggest bank west of the Mississippi in Northfield, Minnesota.

  Cliff Robertson  ...  Cole Younger  
  Robert Duvall  ...  Jesse James  
  Luke Askew  ...  Jim Younger  
  R.G. Armstrong  ...  Clell Miller  
  Dana Elcar  ...  Allen  
  Donald Moffat  ...  Manning  
  John Pearce  ...  Frank James  
  Matt Clark  ...  Bob Younger  
  Wayne Sutherlin  ...  Charley Pitts  
  Robert H. Harris  ...  Wilcox  
  Jack Manning  ...  Heywood  
  Elisha Cook Jr.  ...  Bunker (as Elisha Cook)  
  Royal Dano  ...  Gustavson  
  Mary-Robin Redd  ...  Kate  
  William Callaway  ...  Calliopist (as Bill Calloway)  

Most of the members of the James-Younger Gang had ridden with Confederate guerrillas William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson along the Missouri-Kansas border region during the American Civil War (1861-1865). In retaliation for the guerrillas’ raid on Lawrence, Kansas on August 21, 1863, which left 185 men and boys lying dead on the ground, the section of Missouri that bordered Kansas was completely depopulated to deprive the guerrillas of their support network. When the war ended, the guerrillas and their families tried to rebuild but they suffered frequent harassment and found it nearly impossible to obtain loans from Northern-controlled banks. Hardened by years of partisan warfare, a number of them began robbing banks, initially under the leadership of Archie Clements. After his death in a shootout in December 1866, Frank and Jesse James and Cole Younger became the core of the gang. 
 	   
Grimness is de rigueur in '70s revisionist Westerns, but Philip Kaufman insists on a joshing tempo and delivers a Preston Sturgesian portrait of myth. The tone is plaintive and mocking, established early on by leapfrogging from a Peckinpah ambush to a vision shot through crossed eyes. Jesse James (Robert Duvall) is introduced sitting with brother Frank (John Pearce) in the outhouse, Cole Younger (Cliff Robertson) is outside savoring his pipe and his legend, wowing the crowd with the bulletholes in his leather vest. The outlaws are populist heroes, the Missouri state legislature promises amnesty but then accepts money from railroad bosses so mustache-twirler Pinkerton (Herbert Nelson) can hunt the men down. Corruption flows freely in a divided system -- Seems they left out a whole civil war, one Southern gunslinger says of the centennial banner hailing 100 years of union -- and Younger is ready to adapt, seeing the robbery of Northfield's bank as a withdraw for funds to buy their freedom from crooked authorities. Blinkey-eyed bastard Jessie James is still on the warpath, however, and for him the purpose of the raid is to level this Yankee Gomorrah. Arthur Penn's influence (The Left-Handed Gun, Bonnie and Clyde) is clearly delineated, even as Kaufman's absurdism anticipates The Missouri Breaks: When baseball is heralded as the new national sport, Younger begs to differ and applies his carbine to the scorecard. Among the wonderments that beguile the outlaw are horseless buggies, steam-powered calliopes, a handlebar stache improvised out of mule-tail hair to camouflage a mauled jaw; others include Duvall's bravura rendition of psycho-charlatan zeal and Kaufman's sketch of a vengeful posse storming a brothel and leaving its customers dangling from a tree with trousers down. Younger is caught in a hail of gunfire but survives into the 20th-century, a rascal who, like Kaufman's astronauts, understands the nation's need to believe in heroes.	 

Early in the movie, Pinkerton sends men to ambush the Youngers, saying “this is war, to the knife, and the knife to the hilt.” While it is true that the real Pinkerton Detective Agency had hunted the James-Younger Gang, Pinkerton’s pursuit had ended a year before the raid on Northfield. There is no denying that Pinkerton hated the outlaws. Having lost three agents to the gang, Pinkerton had continued the investigation even after his original client, an express company, had dropped the case. Humiliated and furious that three agents had been killed without any arrests, Pinkerton wrote the superintendent of the agency’s New York office “My blood was spilt, and they must repay. There is no use talking, they must die” shortly before his agents raided the James’ farm in January 1875. An incendiary device thrown into the farmhouse exploded, killing their eight year-old step-brother and wounding their mother so badly that her arm had to be amputated. The uproar caused by the bungled raid led to the submission of a bill guaranteeing a pardon for their war-time crimes and a fair trial for the outlaws, but it was narrowly defeated in the legislature. Instead of chasing the outlaws or interfering with the vote on the amnesty, the actual Pinkerton was in Illinois, relying on the governor’s protection to avoid extradition to Missouri to be tried for his involvement in the raid. 

Clearly a fair amount of research had been done, therefore the changes were made to suit the story. It has the right participants of the raid, but Charlie Pitts and Bill Chadwell are presented as long-term members of the gang, when they were actually recent recruits. It is true that Bob Younger resented Cole’s overbearing personality and had fallen for Jesse’s charisma. The screen Jim Younger does not talk because he was shot in the mouth by a Bushwhacker. In reality, the wound was received at Northfield, and it seems unlikely that he would have been shot by a Bushwhacker, since Confederate guerrillas in Missouri were called Bushwhackers. 

Duvall plays Jesse with a rattlesnake-like menace, pretending to see visions in order to win leadership of the gang from Cole, and even stealing Cole’s idea for the Northfield raid, although he has no genuine loyalty to the other members of the gang. This version of Jesse is a borderline sociopath, who kills men on a whim, does not believe that the war is over, and views all Yankees as prey. Always carrying a Bible, Frank is a bit simple in the head and worships Jesse. 

In the movie, Clell Miller had given up robbing for his wife, who hates the outlaws, but he joins the raid because he misses the excitement. Although the real Clell Miller had been an active member of the gang for several years before the raid on Northfield, this is a key element in the history of the real James-Younger Gang. By 1876, many members of the gang had settled down and were unwilling to risk their lives robbing banks. Only younger outlaws like Jesse still craved the adrenalin rush. 

The script has a very good grasp of the economic situation in the United States at the time, showing how people struggled to survive outside events beyond their control, such as bank crashes, crops destroyed by locusts and influenza epidemics. 

The real gang did spend a couple of weeks in Northfield, posing as cattle buyers and staying in the red light district to avoid attention while they mapped out escape routes. A large portion of the film takes place in Northfield, which enables Kaufman to support the theme that technology is rapidly transforming the outlaws’ world. They are literally stunned when they see a steam-powered tractor and are surprised by the new national pastime, baseball, which appears to have been more rough-and-tumble then. 

While it is not mentioned by the screenplay, the gang’s future was grim. Recent recruit Hobbs Kerry had been captured about a month earlier after throwing around money from his share of the proceeds of a previous robbery. Although he did not know anything about the planned raid in Northfield, he had confessed the names of the members of the gang, so the noose was tightening around the outlaws. 

The key players in Northfield appear but they are given different roles. Nicolaus Gustavson is a crazy man who had lost his son during the war, instead of an innocent man caught in the crossfire. Henry Wheeler was a medical student but there is no evidence that he was so near-sighted that he was almost legally blind. The greatest change is the transformation of the bank president into a greedy slimeball, who justifies his willingness to cheat the townspeople by saying that financiers and speculators like Jay Gould and James Fisk did the same. This portrayal ignores the fact that the gang decided to rob the bank at Northfield because one of its owners was ex-governor, senator and Union general Adelbert Ames, while former Union general Benjamin Butler had deposited a very large sum of money in the bank. Furthermore, banks typically had a reserve in greenbacks (paper currency), not gold, to cover withdrawals. However, the transformation aids Kaufman’s unflattering look at establishment figures, although the hanging of innocent men by worked up posses was probably far too common, since justice was often hard and fast at that time. 

Despite meticulous planning, Cole’s robbery does not go as planned, and the entire town starts shooting at the gang but run away when the outlaws fire back. In reality, a handful of residents calmly picked apart the most feared gang in the United States. The story gets the general facts right, showing who was killed in the town, who died during the pursuit, and who goes to prison, but the survivors had received many more wounds during the shootout in front of the bank. 

The film isn't so much about the raid, ultimately, as it is a study of contrast, between Cole Younger (Cliff Robertson, unusually subdued and good) and Jesse James (Robert Duvall). Younger excites more sympathy with his more poetic, forward-looking view on life, his childlike interest in machines and his (mostly suggested) sympathy for caged convicts. Duvall's James is a thug, a religious hypocrite, and a psychopath; I wonder if Duvall's played a more repulsive character in his career. What's interesting is how Kaufman has both men overreach with this raid, their past actions (one man's senseless murder, the other's seemingly innocuous repair of a steam calliope) catching up with them. Both their careers essentially end with this failed heist (or at least James' career with the gang--he goes on to rob a few more banks); Kaufman, though, shows more sympathy for the less fortunate Younger--despite being paraded around in the cage he earlier regarded with such unspoken dread, Kaufman has him express the last word on the marvels and hilarities he has witnessed around him.