Hollywood Westerns were initially typically low-budget productions - and Black Westerns even more so, as it was believed that they didn’t have mass appeal, largely playing to African-American audiences. But these courageous men and women have yet to be fully and rightfully recognized in film history. While some are quick to groan at every instance of colorblind casting, those same cries for “historical accuracy” or “reverence to source material” have been mostly silent about the century-old Hollywood practice of reassigning POC characters to white actors, while reshaping the history of the Old West as a demonstration of a kind of “manifest destiny” from which non-white people have been effectively “canceled,” to use social media parlance.Ī fact: After the American Civil War, former slaves left the Old South on horseback and on foot for the Old West, seen as a land of opportunity for the industrious and adventurous, to carve out new lives for themselves, with a freedom they’d never experienced. The cinema has also immortalized the cowboy as a white man, erasing the Black Americans who made up one-fourth of the wranglers and riders of the American frontier. The cinema helped immortalize the cowboy, rendering him, in many ways, inseparable from its cultural tradition. The Western film genre is unique to a specific period and place and is, as such, instantly recognizable. But a cursory Google search will offer that this credit has been attributed to a number of other titles that came long before Samuel and even the oldest members of his all-star cast were even born.

Plenty of media stories about Jeymes Samuel’s “The Harder They Fall” have played up the Western’s all-Black cast, with many describing the Netflix film as a “corrective” to the popular Hollywood image of an all-white Old West.

The harder they fall netflix