Raisin’ sand
“The Harder They Fall” offers a new take on the Old West
The film draws attention to forgotten real-life heroes and villains
The opening caption is too emphatic for standard punctuation. “While the events of this story are fictionalised,” it declares, “These. People. Existed.” The statement is true in that some of the characters in “The Harder They Fall”, Jeymes Samuel’s stylish revenge western, share their names, if not much else, with actual historical figures. However, Mr Samuel is making a more general point. The “people” of the caption are also the black people who populated the Old West: Katie Nodjimbadem, an academic, estimates that, in reality, one in four cowboys were black. On the big screen, however, the proportion is far smaller.
Every so often, a black actor has been famous enough to secure a significant role in a western. Pioneers include Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover and Denzel Washington, who led the posse in Antoine Fuqua’s remake of “The Magnificent Seven” in 2016. Sometimes, black actors and white actors are put together as racism-busting odd couples, as in Mel Brooks’s comedy “Blazing Saddles” (1974), featuring Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder, and Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” (2012), with Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz. Mario Van Peebles’s “Posse” (1993) was unusual in that it had a whole gang of African-American former Buffalo Soldiers, albeit with a token white member. Beyond that, you have to search long and hard to find a western in which a black actor does more than pour whisky in a saloon.
Mr Samuel, a black British writer-director who works as a singer-songwriter and music producer under the name of The Bullitts, redresses the balance slightly with his debut feature film. Nearly every character in “The Harder They Fall” is played by a black actor, whether they are a hero or a villain. The main hero is Nat Love (Jonathan Majors). In the opening flashback sequence, his parents are murdered in cold blood by a ruthless bandit, Rufus Buck (Idris Elba), who then carves a cross into Love’s forehead.
With a Luke Skywalker-meets-Harry-Potter back story like that, it is almost inevitable that Love should become a sharp-shooting vigilante who rides around the Wild West with his gang, gunning down wanted criminals. It is inevitable, too, that his ultimate target should be Buck, so the film builds towards a main-street showdown. On one side, there is Buck and his loyal sidekicks, Cherokee Bill (LaKeith Stanfield) and Trudy Smith (Regina King). On the other there is Love and his gang, including Bass Reeves (Delroy Lindo), and his old flame, Mary Fields (Zazie Beetz). As well as its focus on African-American characters, one radical element of “The Harder They Fall” is that women get to fight alongside men.
Such radicalism is rarely articulated in the dialogue. The story, co-written by Mr Samuel and Boaz Yakin, revolves around vendettas, bank robberies, shoot-outs and other western staples, whereas race is mentioned only a few times. Buck, as evil as he is, steals and extorts money to build a town which could be a “promised land” for former slaves. An old white train engineer gets two letters into the n-word before being shot by Trudy. Throughout the rest of the film, Mr Samuel is content to let the casting make his political point for him—the point being that black people have been pushed to the background in too many American period dramas.
Instead of being a revisionist history lesson, “The Harder They Fall” is a rip-roaring homage to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, and, especially, to Mr Tarantino’s postmodern action movies, which are echoed in the smart-alec captions (“Some Time Later”), the grandiloquent monologues, the blood-spurting violence, the cool, swaggering performances and an album’s worth of well-chosen pop music. Leaving the banjos and harmonicas to gather dust, Mr Samuel fills the soundtrack with funk, reggae and hip-hop: one of the film’s producers is Shawn Carter, better known as Jay-Z.
The only disappointing aspect of “The Harder They Fall” is that the lives and personalities of the real Nat Love, Bass Reeves, Rufus Buck and Mary Fields were more interesting than the cartoonish versions presented here. Still, if there is any justice, Mr Samuel’s dynamic film will prompt cinematic tellings of their true stories—and the stories of many more of the Old West’s black heroes and villains. ■
“The Harder They Fall” is released on Netflix on November 3rd