Opening with the James Gang's famous botched bank raid in Northfield, Minnesota in 1876, Ray's version of the legend of brothers Jesse (Robert Wagner) and Frank James (Jeffrey Hunter, later the star of Ray's King of Kings) purports to tell their "true story," which, in classic Ray fashion, shows Jesse turning outlaw as a reaction to the humiliation of Southern farmers in the aftermath of the Civil War. A romantic and rebel leading a double life, Jesse is another of Ray's wounded heroes — confused, conflicted, contradictory — and Ray clearly sees him and his cohort as kin of the troubled teens in Rebel Without a Cause. (He originally wanted Elvis Presley to play the role). Superbly shot in CinemaScope with a sweeping, dynamic sense of space and enclosure, and punctuated by sad ballads delivered by a blind wandering minstrel, Jesse James remakes a myth in very personal terms; its ending is one of the more awe-inspiring in all of Ray. "Ray's special feeling for young mavericks . . . is still apparent, and one brief sequence offers a brilliantly compact lesson in anarchist economics" (Jonathan Rosenbaum).