The Jan. 9th This Weekend’s Film Festival was dedicated to “The Five Best Westerns of the 21st Century (That I’ve Seen)” where I mentioned that I hadn’t yet seen THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD. Now that I have seen the film, I would have placed it at #2 of that list. So for this week I felt it was a good idea to look at the portrayal of assassins on film. The opening film looks at the results of an assassin’s actions while the following four films deal with the inner turmoil of assassins.

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John Frankenheimer’s political thriller is as gripping as it is intelligent. Dripping with irony, the film skewers the Red Scare while never undermining the perceived or realistic threats of Communism at the time. Eerily preceding the assassination of JFK, the film was held from audiences for years. Now the classic stands a one of the best of all time.

Raymond Shaw [Laurence Harvey, BUTTERFIELD 8] is the stepson of a U.S. Senator named Sen. Johnny Iselin (James Gregory, CLAMBAKE), who has made a name for himself by claiming there are Communists among the American government. Raymond’s mother (Angela Lansbury, TV’s MURDER, SHE WROTE) is a domineering woman who uses both her husband and her son to make political moves. Shaw hates her for it, especially when she gets in the way of his romance with Jocelyn Jordan (Leslie Parrish), the daughter of the liberal senator Thomas Jordan (John McGiver, TV’s THE TWILIGHT ZONE). Turns out, Shaw and his troops where taken prisoner in Korea and brainwashed to be assassins. Maj. Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra, FROM HERE TO ETERNITY) keeps having nightmares, which lead him to contact his fellow soldiers and uncover what happened to them during the war. Along the way, he gains help from the beautiful blonde Eugenie Rose Chaney (Janet Leigh, PSYCHO).

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Jean-Jacques Beineix broke onto the scene in 1982 with this stylistic thriller. Roger Ebert states that he has had one of the most anticlimactic directing careers of all filmmakers, never truly following up the promise of his first film. He is credited as one of the chief auteurs, along with Luc Besson and Leos Carax, in the Cinema du look movement of French cinema, which was marked by its sly, hip style. The ’80s movement is a precursor to the slick, referential work of Quentin Tarantino. Think of a young Hitchcockian innocent hero surrounded by the cast of PULP FICTION and you’ll get an idea of what this film has in store.

Jules (Frederic Andrei, VENUS BEAUTY INSTITUTE) is a postman who is obsessed with the beautiful black opera singer Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez), who refuses to record. So Jules travels around Europe smuggling hi-tech recording equipment into her concerts so that he can relive them at home. During one concert, a duo of mirror-sunglass-wearing Thai record pirates spot his actions and hunt him down for the tapes. Making matters worse, a prostitute plants a tape of her confessing that police chief Saporta (Jacques Fabbri) is involved in a prostitution ring in Jules bag. This is right before two thugs — Le Cure (Dominique Pinon, DELICATESSEN) and Krantz (Jean-Jacques Moreau, VAGABOND) — murder her in the street. Later Jules will meet bohemian artist Serge Gorodish (Richard Bohringer, THE LAST METRO) and his 14-year-old Vietnamese muse Alba (Thuy An Luu), who will get wrapped up in the young man’s drama.

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Recently nominated for two Academy Awards, this tale of the end of the life of the famed outlaw Jesse James is in the mode of Terrence Malick crossed with Robert Altman’s MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER. Based on Ron Hansen’s novel, the film is actually about Robert Ford, who has a young man obsessed with James that eventually shot his hero in the back. In turn, the story is about the motivations of an assassin, which brings to mind other real life killers like John Lennon murderer Mark David Chapman or would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley Jr. The contemplative true-life story is the best straight Western in decades.

The story begins with Jesse James (Brad Pitt, 12 MONKEYS) bringing together a new gang to rob a train. It’s to be the last job for his brother Frank (Sam Shepard, THE NOTEBOOK). Robert Ford (Casey Affleck, GERRY) pushes to be more involved in the job, but no one takes him seriously. After the job, Jesse will keep Robert behind to move furniture. Back at his house, his brother Charley (Sam Rockwell, THE GREEN MILE) and Jesse’s cousin Wood Hite (Jeremy Renner, DAHMER) kid Robert about his collection of Jesse James memorabilia. As Jesse gets more and more paranoid of his gang backstabbing him for the reward money on his head, he pays a visit to Ed Miller (Garret Dillahunt, TV’s THE 4400) and Charley and Wood get caught in the middle of a feud between Wood and ladies’ man Dick Liddil (Paul Schneider, ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS).

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