SYNOPSICS
The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) is a English,Swedish,German movie. Philip Kaufman has directed this movie. Cliff Robertson,Robert Duvall,Luke Askew,R.G. Armstrong are the starring of this movie. It was released in 1972. The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) is considered one of the best Drama,Western movie in India and around the world.
In 1876, the Missouri legislature issues a pardon and amnesty to the James and Younger gangs despite many people considering them outlaws. The pardon is because they protected the homesteaders of Clay County against the marauding railroaders, who wouldn't let anyone or anything get in their way of building the railroad where they wanted. However, the railroad companies and banks still consider them outlaws and will take matters into their own hands if they come across the gangs. Prior to the pardon, Cole Younger had contemplated robbing the First National Bank in Northfield, Minnesota - what is considered the largest bank west of the Mississippi - but has now decided against it. Circumstances, including learning that Jesse James and his gang are going ahead with the robbery behind his back, and that the railroaders issuing a war against them which also includes bribing the legislature to revoke the pardon, make Cole change his mind. But right from the start - even during the planning ...
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The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) Reviews
An appealing digression
Interesting movie has something of the rueful eccentricity of a Peckinpah movie, although it's told on a much more modest scale. The movie has a sense of transition, with expressions of wonderment at the new steam engine vehicles and even at the game of baseball - there's a sense of gun culture being pushed out and marginalized, although the town's crooked banker illustrates that the new age isn't going to be free of corruption. The structure also has an appealing oddity, illustrated by the band of pursuers on the train, monitored through the entire movie, only to turn up at the end after it's too late. Duvall is occasionally almost Apostle-like as Jesse James and Robertson gives one of his most flavoured performances as Cole Younger. The movie seems very much like a tentative first work and explores themes and ideas in a fundamentally very modest way, but the overall mood is quirky and distinctive and the trim ninety minutes running time makes it an appealing digression.
The inner life of outlaws
There are a few western staples in 'The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid': the last mission, the friendly whorehouse; but compared with most films of this type, it's a plausible and honest portrait of the life of a criminal gang, and set in the relatively lush lands of the near west instead of the dry high plains further west. In fact, it's based on the story of a real gang, one that featured the legendary Jesse James, and it's refreshing to see this character demystified: he doesn't even take top billing. However, the plot never quite comes to life, and perhaps more could have been made of the gang's origins in the aftermath of the civil war. But like Altman's superior 'McCabe and Mrs. Miller', made at around the same time, the film deserves credit for telling its own tale, instead of merely re-hashing the clichés of the genre.
Bob ain't dead, Jesse ain't the Lord and we ain't going
There are really nice things here. Duvall taken by the spirit and delivering visions of Yankee raids; his sycophant brother following him even to the toilet; Luke Askew's missing lip; the old woman pronouncing doom in cryptic rhyme; Duvall's escape in drag; Robertson shot 16 times. But Kaufman apparently didn't have the chops to know that Bruce Surtees was quietly destroying what could have been a pretty good little art picture. What should be a semi-psychedelic fever dream of distorted Americana looks like a drunken episode of Bonanza, crowded/blurry/badly framed two-shots all in brown. Half the film takes place in the woods, in Missouri, and it's not even green. The whole movie seems to have been shot with a single lens. Even the credits appear cheap and dated. No question, this movie looks as low-end and made-for-TV as any Aldrich or McLaglen Western of the same period. LONG RIDERS, a later, more traditional and visually interesting James Gang movie by Walter Hill, certainly is slicker in delivery. But NORTHFIELD, for all its art-school faults, at least reaches toward transcendence. In Kaufman's writing and direction is an attempt to commandeer the drive-in horse opera formula and ride it into 70s ambiguity. The bad guy heroes are sort of unheroic; the Pinkertons are a cartoon counterpoint; the dialogue is occasionally quite choice. But while this is my favorite screen investigation of Jesse James, the film as a whole does not rise above its weaknesses.
The films of Jesse James
There have been numerous films about Jesse James, most notably Sam Fuller's "I Shot Jesse James", Nick Ray's "The True Story of Jesse James", Kaufman's "The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid", Hill's "The Long Riders" and Dominik's "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford". Being the most recent, Dominik's film gets all the attention, but Kaufman's and Hill's deserve just as much notice. Though released in the 1970s, Kaufman's film must be watched through the lens of his astronaut epic, "The Right Stuff", both films offering an absurdist take on progress and frontier pushing. Here, Jesse is a confused charlatan and the gang's criminality is seen as being outdated in the face of banking cartels, protection rackets and business scams. In this new world, the business man is the new criminal, violence now taking the form of organised sports, rail barons and profit margins. "How much you think that'll fetch?" one man remarks, as he tries to figure out whether he can make more profits selling earrings in pairs or singles. Stuffed dolls are similarly traded for money, whilst steam engines and horseless buggies are treated as, not a form of technological progress, but a form of capitalist spectacle which pushes Jesse and his gang further and further into extinction. Indeed, it is a steam piano constructed to attract people to a bank, which ultimately gets Jesse's gang killed. The gang itself is split into two groups. Those who follow Cole Younger and those who follow Jesse James. Jesse embodies a kind of no-nonsense criminal psychopathy, stealing and killing and forever unable to live up to his romantic myth (he pretends to receive messages from God, but nobody believes him). Cole, in contrast, tries to play the game by the banks' rules, using guile, cunning and elaborate schemes. Significantly, Cole's plan backfires and he dies, whilst the lawless Jesse, a product of a different age, rides comically off into the sunset. Like Altman's "Thieves Like Us", the film subversively portrays its gangs, not as noble Robin Hoods stealing from corporate fat cats, but part of the same all inclusive racket. Walter Hill's "The Long Riders" is a different sort of beast altogether. This is a fast paced action movie, the "legendary moments" in the life of Jesse James downplayed in favour for ambiance and texture. Town dances, chirping crickets, women being pushed on swings, touching romantic relationships with whores...this is film which serves up a certain air of melancholy, before launching into a series of staggeringly violent action set pieces. Hill's gangsters are not wild-eyed maniacs but disenfranchised criminals looking to score easy cash so that they can retire to some country paradise. In other words, it's a Michael Mann macho poem with the violence of Walter Hill's mentor, Sam Peckinpah, grafted on. Hill's film also revolves around a cat and mouse feud between Jesse and the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a group of lawmen working for the banks and railroads. In an effort to humanise the gang, the film paints these lawmen as murderous brutes who kill innocents and set homes ablaze. These, of course, are narrative tactics used to convince us that Jesse and his boys are innocent of any wrong doings and that they were merely provoked by violent authorities. Andrew Dominik's "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford", in contrast, is implicitly about celebrity. Here, Jesse's gang are mythologized through legend and media exposure, and it is this which curses them. Jesse himself is killed, not by Robert Ford, but by celebrity itself. The film is thus about, not only looking, but being looked down upon, looked up at, and having perceptions projected upon you. Jesse's death, in which looking at a picture literally kills him, encapsulates all these themes. It is Jesse's own gaze, his aloof attitude toward Ford, which causes Ford's worshipful stare to be corrupted, but more importantly, co-oped by Pinkerton. Here, celebrity and mythology bulldoze truths, and court death by assuming a kind of superiority. Of course death, rather than debunking myths, tends to reinforce them further. But while all three films go off on their own interesting tangents, they make a mistake which has been around since Henry Fonda's 1939 film, "Jesse James". These films ignore history and turn Jesse in a superstar, a Robin Hood, a pretty boy rogue, when this image was wholly invented by John Edwards, a racist and pro Confederate journalist who wanted to create a heroic figure to help rally people against the Union. At the time, the state of Missouri belonged to the Confederates, whereas the state of Kansas was held by the Union. The two states fought each other fiercely, killing civilians, burning houses and committing various other war crimes. Jesse James, following in his brother's footsteps, joined the Confederates, fought with them for several years and then left the army to form a robbery gang with several soldiers. They hit trains and banks and kept the loot, but because banks and railroads were symbols of the Union States (who were forcing farmers, civilians etc to buy Federal dollars), it became easy for Confederate supporters to turn Jesse into a kind of rebel figure. Jesse then began to milk this image, selling himself as an altruistic warrior who fought evil Yankee rail barons for Southern honour. In reality, far from being the last hurrah of the Confederate cause, Jesse was a cold hearted guy who fought for the preservation of slavery, robbed trains dressed as the KKK and kept all the loot for him and his gang. Of course none of the Jesse James films deal with this, even Dominik's, which is specifically about the allure and falsity of celebrity. 7.9/10 - Interesting.
Pretty amusing, especially for those who have lived in Northfield
There are some very interesting moments in this movie. The performance by Cliff Robertson is indeed very good, and I think the movie raises some interesting points in its portrayal of the James/Younger gang as a metaphor for the final death rattle of the old south against the modernizing north. However, this movie can't seem to decide between a comedic tone or an ironic and cynical one. I would say it succeeds in its more serious moments, but the comedic sections are very contrived. I went to college in Northfield, and I was glad to see my alma mater represented in the film (before its name was changed to Carleton). I became pretty familiar with this raid after attending Northfield's annual "Defeat of Jesse James Days" festivities four times. Surprisingly, the actual raid itself is portrayed fairly accurately, with the proper body count and roughly similar series of events, although some details are different. I liked the irony the filmmakers added with the incident of Cole Younger fixing the rifle that was later used to snipe at his gang members. Oh yeah, and you gotta love those snow capped mountains that surround Northfield (yeah, right), and the whorehouse full of buxom Scandanavians!