The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid

In the years after the Civil War, the Missouri-based outlaws Frank and Jesse James and Cole Younger and his brothers are offered a path back to ordinary life when the state considers amnesty for their crimes. Railroad interests that profited from taking farmland oppose the idea, and the promise of pardon falls apart. With other bandits joining them, the James and Younger gangs turn to robbery, eventually targeting the First National Bank in Northfield, Minnesota, in September 1876. The raid does not go as planned.

Philip Kaufman wrote and directed this 1972 western, the first feature he directed in a run of films that continued through Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Wanderers, The Right Stuff and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Cliff Robertson plays Cole Younger and Robert Duvall plays Jesse James, with Luke Askew, R. G. Armstrong, Dana Elcar and Donald Moffat among a credited cast of 28. Jennings Lang produced for Universal Pictures and Robertson and Associates, and the film runs 91 minutes.

Audience response has been modest: on IMDb it holds 6.1/10 from around 2,600 votes, and on TMDB 5.7/10 from a small number of votes. The title is a dramatization of the Northfield bank raid rather than a documentary account.