Best of the Badmen is a 1951 Western film directed by William D. Russell that is set in Breckenridge Missouri during the post-American Civil War period.

Jeff Clanton, an Army major from Missouri, captures the survivors of the Confederacy's Quantrill's Raiders and convinces them to give themselves up and pledge their allegiance to the Union.

Clanton pledges that they will be paroled, but Matthew Fowler, a carpetbagger who owns a powerful detective agency, is determined to arrest them for the reward.

Clanton is tried by a kangaroo court and sentenced to be hanged the following morning.

He escapes that night and then leads the band of outlaws including Jesse James and the Younger brothers in a vendetta against Matthew Fowler's detective agency.