October 22, 2007 Bonus Bonus Blog
Well, when I step in it, I really step in it. The following email is in response to my review of Jesse James where I said, and I quote, "I felt genuine empathy for Robert Ford! No Jesse movie has ever attempted or
achieved that."

Got this just now:

"Have you ever seen the peculiar Sam Fuller film, 'I Shot Jesse James,' from 1949?

"It is more about Ford than James, and how Ford, re-enacting the murder on stage over the years, warps his personality.

"It's currently out on DVD in a cheap set (by Criterion standards) of the first three Fuller films (including the Arizona history story, 'The Baron of Arizona' with Vincent Price as a slightly fictionalized James Addison Reavis (1843-1914, who attempted fraudulently to seize Arizona land-grant properties.

"(The third film in the set, 'The Steel Helmet' is one of the first war movies ever made in Hollywood to question the pieties of war films, and the pieties of America's moral superiority -- a North Korean captured soldier taunts a Black American about his so-called freedom in the U.S. It's a pretty good film, too.)"
—Richard Nilsen, The Arizona Republic