Thursday, December 4, 2008

Shakespeare and Jesse James

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Dir. Andrew Dominik. Perf. Sam Shepard, Mary-Louise Parker, Casey Affleck, and Brad Pitt. 2007. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2008.

Some time ago, I heard a rumor that there was some Shakespeare-related matter in the latest Jesse James flick. It turns out to be true! I prepared a short clip of the scene in question (the sound was terrible, so I put the text over the images). As they're waiting to rob the train, one of the bandits quotes the first four lines of Sonnet 62 (you can just barely hear it, I'm afraid) in a delightful backwoods Missouri accent:
Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye
And all my soul and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.

Links: The Film at IMDB.

Click below to purchase the film from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

1 comment:

Saad said...

Apparently Frank James (played by Sam Shepard, who was reciting the sonnet) did have a fondness for Shakespeare in real life and considered being a teacher.

Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest