Kansas Raiders (1950)

Jesse James, his brother Frank, the Younger brothers, and Kit Dalton travel to Kansas to join up with the Confederate guerilla raiders lead by William Quantrill. Somehow Quantrill’s methods are too savage even for the likes of Jesse James and he wants to leave the group, but not before committing a couple more war crime atrocities. Despite all that, it still portrays these men in a relatively heroic light, similar to The Lawless Breed, with Brian Donlevy’s Quantrill and Audie Murphy’s Jesse forming somewhat of a father-son relationship. It’s always weird reading the real life history of such characters where Donlevy is almost 50 playing someone who died at the age of 27. I enjoyed seeing Audie Murphy’s performance. He has quite the baby-faced star quality. It’s unfortunate that he starred in mostly middle level Westerns, but I’ll probably seek out some of them regardless.