Director Samuel Fuller said that he wanted to make this picture because, unlike many filmmakers in Hollywood, he did not see the real Jesse James as a folk hero or someone to be admired. Fuller saw him as a cold-blooded psychopath who shot down women, children, the elderly, the helpless (his gang once stopped a Union hospital train and executed every wounded federal soldier on it) and, in Fuller's words, Bob Ford "did something that should have been done quite a bit earlier in the life of Jesse Woodson James".
Shot in ten days.
The character played by Robin Short, identified in the cast merely as "Troubadour," is obviously based on the real-life traveling musician Billy Gashade, who shortly after Jesse James' death wrote the "Ballad of Jesse James" sung by Short in the film and also used as a recurring theme by composer Albert Glasser.
John Ireland and Tommy Noonan play the Ford brothers in this movie. They were real life half-brothers.