This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

It's an engaging Western. Henry Fonda is Frank James in post-civil war Missouri. His brother Jesse is dead, killed by the Ford brothers and engineered by the railroad. Many of the characters are carried over from "Jesse James," a year or two earlier.Poor Fritz Lang. From the monumental "Metropolis" to Jesse James' less colorful older brother. Such was the fate of many who were escaping the Nazis. Lang's wife was Jewish but he was thought so highly of that he was asked by Goebbels to head the propaganda division of the Third Reich. According to Lang, his reply to Goebbels was, "I'm tickled pink," and then he was on the fastest airplane out of Germany. He went on to film some very effective noirs in the 50s, including "The Woman in the Window" and "Scarlet Street." However, here he is, behind the camera on a sequel. And it's not bad. The script is proficient, though without the exciting action scenes of the forebear, but shot in the magnificent color that was characteristic of 20th-Century Fox Studios at the time. This movie is suitably dark but some of the studio's musicals were in such loud colors that they resembled animated cartoons.Anyway, Jesse James was shot in the back by the Bob Ford and his brother. Frank quickly dispatches the other ford but Bob remains an elusive target. In the course of his pursuit, Frank James stages his own death and assumes a different identity. In this peaceful guise, he runs into Gene Tierney, a woman of sass and principle, for whom saving a life is better than causing a death.It gets complicated but winds up a courtroom drama in which the plain-spoken Frank is being tried for murder. He's defended by the choleric Henry Hull, newspaper editor and lawyer. Hull shouts his lines, including a paraphrase of Shakespeare from Henry VI, Part 2, in which a revolutionary cries: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." Frank James is found guilty and is drawn and quartered, his intestines spilling out, the giddy spectators splattered with blood. Just kidding. He gets off.It's WHY he gets off that's a little disturbing. The narrative is involving, but its values are those of "Gone With the Wind" and "Birth of a Nation." The Confederaly was "good" and the Yankees were "bad," and that's all there is to it. All the heavies are cowards. And they're the cause of all dysfunction. The prosecutor in the case, for instance, is a man who is being paid by the Yankee railroad. He's made ridiculous. The judge is biased, the jury is biased, the defense is biased, the audience is biased, and the viewers -- willy nilly -- endorse the notion that the Confederacy was good, partly because a man settled his own affairs, like shooting his enemies in the front instead of the back.Disregarding that, Henry Fonda does a nice job as a subdued ex bandit driven by family honor. Henry Hull's character has only one dimension but it's an amusing one. Gene Tierney is exquisite but has a voice that -- if a mouse could speak -- would sound like a mouse's.Treat it as fiction and enjoy it.

This was an adequate sequel to the 1939 film "Jesse James", but not nearly as good as the original. To keep continuity intact, Henry Fonda returns as the title character, and other actors reprise their roles from the earlier picture as well. Particularly good was Henry Hull as the bombastic Major Rufus Cobb, along with John Carradine as outlaw Bob Ford.Except for the embarrassing fabrication of Western history, the film stands as an entertaining story and a nice showcase for the film debut of Gene Tierney portraying Eleanor Stone, a reporter for the Denver Star newspaper run by her father (Lloyd Corrigan). However I couldn't warm up to the casting of Jackie Cooper as Jesse James' grown up son Clem. I guess I'd seen him in just enough 'Our Gang' shorts to make him seem less credible as an outlaw here. One thing is certain, his death scene in the picture is one of the corniest I've ever seen, virtually throwing his head aside as he expires. It just didn't seem believable to me.One other comment I would make has to deal with the horses Frank and Clem rode during their getaway ride. They were lathered to such a degree that it made me wonder if that was really possible after a hard ride. But at least these steeds stayed on their feet, as opposed to the wild spills taken by the horses in "Jesse James". In that one, Henry Fonda's mount went over a cliff in a virtual somersault, and I would venture to guess, a stunt like that could never be duplicated again.

Jesse James is murdered by Bob and Charlie Ford (John Carradine, Charles Hadden). At first, Jesse's brother Frank (Henry Fonda) is content to let the law handle things. But when the Governor steps in to pardon the Fords, Frank decides to take matters into his own hands.Sequel to Jesse James is wildly historically inaccurate. But I expected as much going into it so that didn't bother me really. It's directed by Fritz Lang but you wouldn't know it as the direction is pretty workmanlike. It's filmed in Technicolor, which is nice. Henry Fonda stars and is likable. Jackie Cooper plays his sidekick and he's just awful. John Carradine is great as usual. It's always nice to see Henry Hull and Donald Meek, as well. This is the film debut of beautiful Gene Tierney. She looks lovely as ever, especially in Technicolor. It's not a bad western but not a particularly unique one. It's the kind of picture I would imagine appealed more to kids in 1940 than their parents.

Some things in cinema never seem to change. The cash-in sequel is one of them. Fox's 1939 Production of Jesse James was an almost perfectly constructed example of that rare thing – a Western drama. Sure, it had an appropriate amount of action and cowboy business, but it also granted depth and humanity to its characters, giving as much weight to its intimate moments as its rip-roaring ones. In contrast, The Return of Frank James is a hearty cliché-fest, cheaply made and with an uncomplicated script by the disappointingly un-prestigious Sam Hellman.The director here is Fritz Lang, a man now best remembered for his starkly Germanic silent pictures, and the poverty row noir thrillers he made later on. A heroic Western would seem to be the absolute antithesis of his comfort zone. But there was another Fritz Lang, one of carefree, comic-book adventure, who made pictures like The Spiders, Frau im Mond and The Tiger of Eschnapur. True to the simplistic material, Lang shoots the action scenes with an emphasis on pace and excitement. And yet you can recognise his outsider's approach to the genre. Rather than showing off the vastness and beauty of the old west, he presents it as a harsh, almost alien terrain, full of barren mountains and spiky trees. But this doesn't come across as a cynical rejection of the romanticism of the frontier – after all he still draws attention to natural beauty in the scenes at the farm. It seems more the case that Lang wishes to show the west as a perilous landscape, making the adventure more frantic and the danger more genuine.You might also expect a director like Fritz Lang, whose shot composition was all about piercing shadows and swathes of grey, to struggle on his first Technicolor assignment. However Lang makes brilliantly restrained and practical use of colour, and really its no wonder since he pays such attention to detail in his shot compositions. In the first few scenes he strictly limits himself to a scheme of yellows and greys. Then, when Henry Fonda realises it's time to hunt down the Fords, we are suddenly jolted by a close-up of his gun wrapped in a bold red cloth. Throughout the picture Lang uses colour schemes to give mood and tone to each location, and even help define character. In the scene where Gene Tierney's character is first introduced, she is wearing a grey and maroon outfit that blends in with the plush décor of the hotel parlour.As with many directors with a strong visual style, Lang's Achilles heel was getting the best out of his actors. Lang seems to have had a particular fondness for hams and hamminess, and does not seem to have encouraged naturalism. The camera seems to linger longer than strictly necessary on the cartoonish comedy business of Henry Hull and Ernest Whitman. Henry Fonda seems barely interested and does little more than recite his lines. Gene Tierney is rather feeble, although to be fair this is her screen debut. Jackie Cooper is merely average. To be fair though, the screenplay doesn't really give any of the leads a chance to show off their dramatic skills. On the other hand, John Carradine, who for a primary villain has a bizarrely small part with virtually no dialogue, is nevertheless at his dastardly best, and effectively menacing in his wordless appearance at the end of the court scene.Lang by now had a reputation as a tyrant on the set and a pain to producers, and as such he was now being passed from studio to studio and assigned second rate projects like this. And while he clearly had respect for the American motion picture, he had become and would remain a Hollywood misfit. I suspect Henry Hull's constantly referring to Frank James' gun as a "weepon" may even have been a cheeky joke at the expense of Lang, who might have unknowingly been making the same mispronunciation. And yet it is really only Lang's odd yet innocently enthusiastic take on the Western that gives The Return of Frank James character, and make it at all worth watching today.