That Dirty Little Coward Who Shot Mister Howard 

And laid pore Jesse in his grave."

From The Ballad of Jesse James, whom I don't know who wrote it.  All I know is my granddaddy used to sing it to me.

A while back I was doing some research for my friend Marsh concerning an attempt to authenticate a tintype he'd purchased.  It might be a previously unknown image of Bob Younger shortly after he was released from prison.  If so, it's the only post-release photo of Bob Younger.

All the focus I was doing studying photos and tintypes of the Youngers and the James brothers motivated me, when I came across a copy of The Long Riders while digging around looking for computer parts, to watch it.  Not all of it, but enough to know the rest will be watched before long.

The movie stars the various Carradines as the Younger brothers, Stacy Keach and James Keach as Frank and Jesse James, Randy Quad, who'd probably have made a good Cole Younger if physical likeness had any bearing on casting.  Instead, Cole was played by the Carradine who was into some Kung Foo thing on the television set sometime a long time ago.  Probably did a better job of Cole, acting-wise, than Quad would have done.

This James Keach who played Jesse James I've never seen before, but I thought he did a good job if running around stone-faced isn't his natural condition.  If they'd had six or seven clones of him they'd have captured the whole gang on filum.

Anyway, what I'm leading up to saying is the movie did as good a job as might be hoped in recreating some history of post-Civil War middle-west and the various outlawry, Pinkertons, whys and wherefores.

Not a bad movie all in all.

I'm looking forward to watching it all the way through before too much more time passes.

J