I love Westerns, and I applaud this exciting modern take.
The Harder They Fall
The Harder They Fall is a new Netflix Western with a majority of its cast Black. If you anticipate a diatribe about white injustice’s treatment toward people of color around the Civil War, go to 12 Years a Slave because this oater has its sensibilities more in creativity than in imitation. Importantly, consider that a third of real cowboys were Black.
Writer/director/songwriter Jeymes Samuel has crafted a unique version of the well-known genre, larding it with Western tropes and themes but guiding it with a modern sensibility. Curiously, only until late in the film does the issue of racial inequality become prominent.
Otherwise, Samuel re-creates the Wild West as colorblind; it is rather a battlefield of bloody outlaws, including a hefty number of women doing bad things. He does feature, however, a predominantly Black town and a White one, so the segregation is intact.
Harder is a story of revenge tethered to greed, but mostly revenge by patricide, fratricide, and pride to sweeten the racial pot.
Nat Love (Jonathan Majors) seeks the murderer of his family, Rufus Buck (Idris Elba), after finding that Buck has been recently released from a lifetime incarceration. And so it goes right up to the formulaic showdown that pretty much makes ones like that of High Noon seem tame by comparison. However, long before that impressive ending, Samuel and his expert cast carve out personalities far better defined than in most modern super-hero blockbusters, best exemplified when Nat and Trudy (Regina King) rob a truly “white bank.”
As to be expected in modernizing the genre, wisecracking is common but not as forced as in most super-hero films. Also, the parched and expansive New Mexican landscape serves the constant contrast between the wide-open spaces that suggest freedom and the imprisoning life of a small town. Most of all, Samuel is all over the sound track with his own compositions and variations of highlife classics and reggae. It’s not like any Western soundtrack you ever heard—it modernizes by fitting meaning to action and fusing music from other places than New Mexico.
Samuel is focused on re-creation that takes seriously individual rights but also foments a lawlessness characteristic of the genre. Unusually for a Western hero, Nat gives almost as much effort to reconciling with and saving his former lover, Mary (Zazie Beets), as with his revenge, a bit different than in High Noon.
The Harder They Fall is first-rate updating of the iconic Western, an evolution much to be celebrated. The similarity to a Tarantino epic is welcomed, to be expected as directors see his long shadow. Also check out Old Henry on Prime for a variation on the usual prescription.
Harder shows a Western can rise above its formula to create first-rate drama out of chaos.
The Harder They Fall
Director: Jeymes Samuel (They Die by Dawn)
Screenplay: Samuel, Boaz Yakin (Aviva)
Cast: Idris Elba (Concrete Cowboy), LaKeith Stanfield (Judas and the Black Messiah)
Run Time: 130 m
Rating: R
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JohnDeSando62@gmail.com
