"The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid" wasn't Philip Kaufman's first film but it was the one that put him on the map. It was a revisionist western clearly influenced by "The Wild Bunch" and "Bonnie and Clyde" and dealt with the events that lead to the capture of Cole Younger when the bank raid of the title went disastrously wrong and it starred Cliff Robertson as Younger and Robert Duvall as Jesse James, (he escaped and lived to fight another day). Naturally, realism and violence were the order of the day. Here was a western about outlaws that broke the rules; here was a western with a baseball game in the middle, introduced as America's national sport, though Cole Younger counters that remark by reminding the speaker that shooting was, and always will be, America's national sport.
Kaufman, of course, treats everything, not just 'realistically', but with a good deal of irreverence and a steak of black comedy with the raid itself brilliantly handled. The film certainly marked Kaufman out as one of the brightest of the new kids on the block and he followed it with a handful of brilliantly deverse films that included "The Incredible Lightness of Being" and "The Right Stuff" but he never really had the career one might have expected of him and ended up making only twelve feature films in total.
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