Jeff Arnold’s West

The blog of a Western fan, for other Western fans

Ride with the Devil (Universal, 1999)

 

The best film about Jesse James didn’t feature Jesse James

 

Today we’re going to transition out of our Jesse James obsession (JAW has become quite Jesseholic of late) by looking at a ‘sort-of’ James boys picture, although as Johnny Boggs said, the best film about Jesse James didn’t feature Jesse James. That’s alright. The best film about Custer, Fort Apache, didn’t have Custer in it, either.

 

 

Ride with the Devil, director Ang Lee’s only Western (unless you count Brokeback Mountain) stars Tobey Maguire (apparently Matt Damon and Leonardo Di Caprio passed on the role). Mr Maguire manages never to look like Spider Man and only once look like Peter Parker, when he has his hair cut in the last reel. For most of the footage he is a Confederate guerrilla in Missouri with flowing locks and a Rebel shirt.

 

 

One of his fellow guerrillas is Simon Baker, also with flowing l., but he doesn’t look like the Mentalist at all.

 

 

It’s a Bushwhackers v Jayhawkers Jesse James-ish tale, though as I said, Jesse and Frank never appear, nor any Younger. And there’s no Bloody Bill Anderson either. But we do get Quantrill (John Ales) who in fact, with the aid of the costume and make-up persons, quite resembles the Quantrill of portraits, which is more than most Quantrills ever do (a slim man in his twenties, he’s been played by bulky Brian Donlevy, Leo Gordon, Forrest Tucker, even heavyweight Broderick Crawford for goodness sake).

 

The screenplay and Mr Ales capture well the mixture of charisma, passion, ruthlessness and scurrilous demagoguery of Quantrill. In fact the script (James Schamus’s adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s 1987 novel Woe to Live On) is intelligent and subtle.

 

 

The war is a local affair, people are fighting for complex and even uncertain personal motives, and nothing is black and white. In fact one combatant, Holt (Jeffrey Wright), is a black man fighting with the Confederates out of personal loyalty. Gradually Holt’s fellow fighters come to see him as a person rather than a Negro. Holt and the hero are both wounded in battle, but by one of their own side who hates them.

 

It’s not black and white

 

The love interest is provided by blonde Rebel sympathizer Sue Lee (Jewel, the singer) who gets pregnant by one of the guerrilla pals and then marries the other. Ms Jewel plays it straight, advisedly, and does her best but in all honesty she is hardly Old Vic material.

 

 

Roger Ebert has made the point that it’s a rare film in that the characters do not seem to know already which side is going to win the war (most screenplays make a specialty of hindsight). Perhaps it’s good to have a non-American like Mr Ang (born in Taiwan and now a US resident but not a US citizen) making a film about the Civil War; it gives impartiality or ‘externality’, and maybe clarity of vision.

 

It’s a psychological Western in the sense that it concentrates more on the personalities and the interaction between them than on their adventures (that was also the case with some Jesse James films), though there is plenty of action, including the raid on Lawrence. It’s a long film, with much talking (often death to a Western). Ang goes for an authentic period look but manages, mostly, to avoid Sense and Sensibility picture-postcard costume-drama status. There could perhaps have been more dirt.

 

The language is fairly convincing as nineteenth-century talk, from the writing point of view (the captured letters read out were especially good). However, although many reviews of this movie praised the acting (the San Francisco Chronicle thought Jewel “terrific in the part”), I myself thought the cast didn’t quite bring it off; it didn’t always sound natural. Maguire didn’t quite convince as a tough guerrilla fighter or violent youth; he didn’t seem angry or vicious enough.

 

The action is realistic, with confused movement, noise and bullets whipping past, and the reconstruction of the Lawrence raid is very well done. But the tone of most of the film is cool and observant. Ang seems to have insisted on low-key, unhistrionic performances. Even the sex is done discreetly and in an unHollywood way.

 

These guerrillas sure fancied themselves

 

I did enjoy the movie, and though it was very long it didn’t drag for me, but I myself wouldn’t put it in the very top drawer of recent Westerns. It didn’t storm the Oscars or anything. Stephen Holden in The New York Times called it “visually arresting but dramatically flat”. Still, it’s pretty darn good, and you could certainly watch it.

 

Even if Jesse James isn’t in it.

 

9 Responses

  1. I really like this film too. It is convincing to me. Interesting the novel had Cole Younger as a character in a few scenes but he’s not in the movie. The Criterion release of this is really nice.

  2. I really enjoyed this Civil War Western about a theatre of that conflict that doesn’t get a lot of serious attention. For that matter, the film didn’t garner a lot of serious attention either. Too bad, ’cause there’s plenty of good things in it. You’re right about the acting Jeff, it is uneven. I was impressed with Jeffrey Wright as “Holt” however. I thought he was very good – making me wish that his character was more central to the story. It might have been interesting if the authors or filmmakers had followed up on his story after the war.

    1. I often wonder ‘what happened afterwards’ to characters in Westerns. I’d like to go back to the OPEN RANGE town,for example, five years later and see Robert Duvall running the saloon and Costner as town marshal.

    2. The novel ‘Woe to Live On’ that the movie is based I highly recommend as it is a good companion to the movie and the characters.

        1. Yes, the unique language of the movie is from the novel. I think it gives the story distinction like ‘True Grit’.

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