The Return of Frank James

When his brother Jesse’s killers are acquitted, Frank feels betrayed by the justice system. Where the law fails, the individual takes matters into his own hands—even if doing so places him squarely in the law's crosshairs. Yet his quest for vengeance is repeatedly thwarted—ultimately by a crisis of conscience... Following his naturalization in November 1939 and the failure of *You and Me*, Lang—who, like many of his contemporaries, had been an avid reader of Karl May stories in his youth—turned his attention to the quintessential American genre: the Western. He cared little for the genre's customary visual spectacle; on the contrary, he mocked it by highlighting its artificiality and weaving traces of everything from "Mabuse" to "Die Nibelungen" into this commissioned work.
(Florian Widegger)