The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a film whose official title you will almost certainly never see on a movie marquee. Since most marquees are featured in theaters showing at least a dozen other movies, there just won’t be room for that mouthful. It will most likely be shortened to The Assassination of Jesse James or, possibly, all the way down to just Jesse James. Although The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford might seem like one of the longest titles in movie history, in actuality it really isn’t even close.
Extra-long titles are usually the domain of really bad flicks seeking to get any kind of marketing mileage they can. Probably the highest ranking masterpiece with the longest title would be Dr. Strangelove; or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Of course, you rarely actually hear that movie referred to by anything other than its severely shortened, to-the-point title of Dr. Strangelove. There have been other films of quality that have chosen to seek the very limits of marquee space, of course, including two very recent additions. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Then there is the curious case of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, which is almost universally referred to by one single word: Borat. And, in addition to being painfully long movies, the Bored of the Rings trilogy also individually try the patience of anyone wanting to write out their full titles.
It is just coincidence or something more telling that 18 of the Academy Award winners for Best Picture to date are one word titles, and that’s not even including those two word titles where The is the second word. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is not just the longest title to ever-amazingly-win Best Picture, but it is the only Best Picture winner to have more than six words. While there are some incredibly long movie titles that are long merely for the sake of trying to fit in as many words as possible, even some of the exploitation movies with long titles are fitting. Of course, any MST3K fan would instantly nominated The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies as being among the best long titles ever where every single word in the title is, while not necessarily necessary, at least fitting. I Married a Monster from Outer Space isn’t a brazenly long title, but for a B-movie that is actually better than the one-word movie that won the Oscar for Best Picture that year-Gigi-it not only accurately depicts what happens, but also manages to completely undermine the serious subtext of the film by doing so.
Often, a long movie title dooms a movie not because of the length, but because despite the fact that the title is nearly as long as the average summary, it succeeds in telling potential audiences nothing about what they might be going to see. The most stunning example of this in recent years was probably the Hugh Grant movie The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. Seriously, is there anyone who has the slightest idea what that movie might be about? Likewise what about The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds? The weird thing about that one is that it based on a Pulitzer Prize winning play. Even so, I seriously doubt that one in a hundred could answer what it is about solely based on the title. One particularly long movie title that has always fascinated me and that I have yet to see despite the fact it stars one of my favorite actors and has a premise that sounds like the only thing other literary endeavor I’ve yet come across that bears even a remote similarity to my novel AntiChrist Superstar: The Musical. The movie is called Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?
The choice of the makers of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford to title their film thusly-and it’s a serious entry starring no less than Brad Pitt-is interesting and does appear to be the latest in a trend. Just as the two to three hour long movie had gotten to the point where it is no longer reserved for epic tales or historical dramas, but has trickled down even to movies based on animatronic rides at Disneyland, so are we finding more movies with long titles. What is the ideal movie title length? Impossible to say, of course. Would a film about the attempt of a second class composer to destroy a genius have been any less successful had it been titled The Nearly-True Story of a Composer in the Court of Emperor Joseph II Who Drives Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a Fatal Madness, or would it still have won Best Picture? Before answering that question, you might want to ask the writers of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. That full title was used on the poster when the film was released in the late 1960s. If you purchase the DVD, however, you will find that it under the title by which it had always been popularly known: Marat/Sade.
