COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 3

 Another note on the topic of cosmic alignment...

I discussed more than a few western-related examples of alignment in the first essay in this series, and here I'll discuss a largely forgotten western with crossover aspects. 

In the first essay, I noted that a character like Doc Holliday became a "Sub" in at least one of his fictional re-creations, where he regularly assisted buddy Wyatt Earp in the 1950s TV show of the same name. Holliday seems to have only rarely garnered solo status as a Prime, an exception being the 1971 DOC, in which the dissolute former dentist was portrayed by Stacy Keach. I also mentioned that Holliday accrued Prime stature in a 1999 TV-movie, PURGATORY, though only by teaming up with three other deceased gunfighters.

Like Holliday and Billy the Kid, Jesse James has generated numerous innominate texts about his supposed career. One such is the 1960 B-western YOUNG JESSE JAMES, in which Jesse is re-imagined as a young hothead in the "juvenile delinquent" mode still popular during the period. The film resembles little about the real lives of the James Brothers or their allies the Youngers, except in stating that they all rode at one time or another with Quantrill's Raiders. The film shows Jesse gaining vengeance on a man who killed his father, after which he tries, not very successfully, to live a just life, only to be pulled back into outlawry. 

The subject of alignment applies particularly well to the way that all other members of the James-Younger gang became "Subs" to the "Prime" presence of Jesse (Ray Strickland), including older brother Frank, Major Quantrill, and all of the Younger Brothers. For whatever reason, most depictions of the two gangs tend to make Jesse James the center of attention, whatever the realities of history.

The most curious insertion, though, is that of Belle Starr (Merry Anders). The real "shady lady" had nothing to do with Jesse James, though a disproven story did circulate about her having married the uncle of Cole Younger. I'd conjecture that the story of that tenuous relationship was the reason the writer shoehorned Belle Starr into the story, though she only has a few scenes in which she gives the outlaws a haven and has a romantic interlude with Cole Younger himself. I can imagine that the movie-makers wanted a little extra sex appeal in the mix, if only for promotional ads, since there's one moment in which Jesse makes a pass at Belle and she slaps him down, calling him a "young colt." (Amusingly, Strickland was six years older than Anders.) So in my system, while Frank James and the Youngers are normally aligned to the story-cosmos that was Jesse James, Belle Starr was "out of alignment" with Jesse's cosmos, much like the interaction with the four gunfighters in the aforementioned PURGATORY are out of alignment with one another, not having been associated either in real history or in legend. Thus YOUNG JESSE JAMES would not be a crossover film if it had confined itself to subordinating the real associates of Real Jesse James to the narrative authority of Fictional Jesse. But Belle Starr's presence makes the film a crossover, however minor.