Tales of Frank and Jesse, Writ Large and Told Well

They don’t make criminals like they used to.

We know all about some of these yellowing antiques of crime from movies set in the Old West. Now you take Jesse James, the legendary Missouri outlaw whose illegal activities with his older brother, Frank, and the also-famed Younger brothers, have been the stuff of screenwriters for decades.

Moviedom has produced almost as many Jesse Jameses as Wyatt Earps. Jesse looked remarkably like Tyrone Power in “Jesse James” (1939). His alleged son joined another famous outlaw gang in the 3-D “Jesse James vs. the Daltons” (1954). Jesse binged on a southern town’s females in “Jesse James’ Women” (1954). And Dr. Frankenstein’s ingenious progeny gave Jesse’s loyal sidekick a monster-brain implant in “Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter” (1966).

So you figure, with this solid cinematic grounding in U.S. history, what have we to learn from a TV account of the Jameses and Youngers in Part 1 of the Discovery Channel’s four-episode documentary “Outlaws and Lawmen”?

As it turns out, plenty, while having great fun.

But history, shmistory. Why bother? “Because Americans have always had a love-hate relationship with outlaws,” Los Angeles historian Roger D. McGrath, one of several talking heads featured in the series, said this week. “Essentially we’re conformists and patriots who support the establishment, yet on the other hand we are very independent-spirited. This means that often the characters whom we hero-worship and romanticize most are those who did things independently as individuals without the support of established institutions. Somehow that captures the essence of what it means to be an American.”

Intent on capturing greenbacks, the Jameses, Youngers and like-minded autonomous entrepreneurs of their era and region not only operated independently of institutions, they victimized them. They made money the old-fashioned way. They stole it.

“It was February 1866,” begins narrator James Farentino in Sunday’s initial hour, titled “Legacy of War,” describing the nation’s first recorded armed bank robbery as actors playing the shadowy thieves silently enter the Liberty, Mo., establishment. It’s the first of many artful, persuasively mounted reenactments that help energize this smart, highly visual, ever-rewarding “tale of outlawery” that traces these former Johnny Rebs from the Civil War smolderings that begat the James-Younger gang to their decadence in the advancing shadow of the 20th century.

In next week’s episodes, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and Wild Bill Hickock are among the Dodge Citians starring in “Tall in the Saddle” (Monday); Cole Younger and the James brothers share time with Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch gang in “The Train Robbers” (Tuesday); and Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd and sweet Ma Barker and her brood tommy gun their way across “The New Breed” (Wednesday).

In contrast to the goofy monster brain and revisionist tilt of other big-screen Jesse tracts, “Legacy of War” takes relatively small liberties. One is a suggestion, which most historians likely would reject, that Yankees did the vast bulk of marauding in Missouri during the Civil War, as if the state were almost exclusively inhabited by Confederate innocents beset upon by northern ruffians. Some other bits of history also are fuzzed over.

Overwhelmingly, though, this Telenova production is grand, authoritative storytelling, the rare documentary that preserves historical integrity while playing on the screen almost like an adventure film, thanks largely to a script by John Byrne Cooke (Alistair Cooke’s son) and those stylish reenactments shaped by field producer Lisa Samford, director-cinematographer Arnie Sirlin and the historical groups that perform them. The huge cast of extras is itself an army.

Jesse James was a mere teenager when the war ended, and he paid his dues, in effect, before eclipsing the older Frank James and Cole Younger (who themselves were then only in their 20s) in the public eye. Assisted by rave reviews in the Kansas City Times and his own self-generated press agentry, he became a romantic outlaw figure viewed throughout the Midwest as heroic.

Why heroic? “Because of his boldness, his cunning, his guile, his courage, and because he did his utmost to avoid casualties,” McGrath said. Jesse also was admired, McGrath added, because he “left individual substations unmolested” while striking at epic institutions, the banks and railroads that many in the Midwest, for example, blamed for the great economic panic of 1873.

“He didn’t prey on the weak,” McGrath said. “Today you have criminals who do, who knock down an old woman or hijack a car. You had criminals who preyed on the weak then, too, but people took them out and hanged them.”

But not Jesse, who was his own publicist, we hear from “Legacy of War,” even creating his own press releases that he would give conductors on the trains he robbed, asking them to fill in the space left blank for the monetary amount of his heist.

Ultimately believing their own press clippings, James-Younger gang members played out these roles “on the stage of the American West,” historian Paul Andrew Hutton says on the program.

It was a stage that also included the likes of unheroic “Bloody Bill” Anderson and Allan Pinkerton, the nation’s most famous and influential private eye, whose Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency had the following motto that it displayed outside its three-story Chicago headquarters: “We Never Sleep.” Nor will you while watching this colorful and worthwhile flashback.

* “Outlaws and Lawmen” airs Sunday through Wednesday at 10 p.m. on cable’s Discovery Channel.