Sam Fuller’s first film as a director is about the loneliness of Robert Ford, the man who killed Jesse James. Fuller’s screenplay bends historical facts like they’re pipe cleaners, but ekes out some entertaining drama about a tragic figure. In the movie, as in reality, Ford is a James gang turncoat who shoots an unarmed Jesse James in the back. After that, the film follows Ford’s path as a pariah of the Old West, where shooting a man in the back is considered the lowest of the low.
Some writers believe this to be a subtle homosexual love story between Bob Ford and Jesse James, and Fuller himself insinuated such, but I disagree. Ford shoots Jesse James so he can make a clean break from the outlaw life and be with a woman he loves. When that doesn’t work out (she, like everyone else, is repulsed by him because of his perceived act of cowardice), he spends the rest of the movie reeling from it. If Ford regrets the shooting, I think it’s because he agrees with everyone that it was a dishonorable act (and it turned out to be all for nothing). If Ford says he loved James, I think he loved him because Jesse James is such a likable gang leader who cares for the well-being of his men.
And if, as in one scene here, Ford scrubs Jesse James’s back while he’s taking a bath, well, HEY, those handy back scrubbers that we all have now hadn’t been invented yet in 1882!