A rare addition to the slender canon of African-American westerns, The Harder They Fall puts an action-heavy, music-saturated, neo-blaxploitation spin on classic cowboy movie tropes. Co-produced by hip-hop mogul Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter, who also appears on the starry soundtrack, it features a heavyweight gallery of high-profile black actors including Idris Elba, Regina King, Jonathan Majors, LaKeith Stanfield and Delroy Lindo. This lavish-looking Netflix production is the second feature from Jeymes “The Bullitts” Samuel, a British musician and studio producer turned film-maker who also happens to be the younger brother of pop superstar Seal. His directing debut, They Die by Dawn (2013), was also a western and even featured some of the same real-life historical characters.
In its flashy, splashy style, Samuel’s film borrows shamelessly from Sergio Leone’s classic spaghetti westerns, Sam Peckinpah’s fatalistic frontier sagas, and more recent self-aware Old West revisionists like Quentin Tarantino – indeed, Tarantino’s former producer Lawrence Bender also has a credit here. The plot is a fistful of cliches, and the humour as subtle as a shotgun blast to the face, but the rich ensemble cast and handsome New Mexico locations add up to a glossy overall package that is best enjoyed as deluxe bubblegum entertainment. With its headline-grabbing mix of transatlantic talents, The Harder They Fall is a smart choice of opening gala for the first post-pandemic edition of the London Film Festival this week, world premiering on the big screen ahead of its limited theatrical release on October 22 and Netflix debut November 3.
A generation-spanning plot opens with the cold-blooded murder of a pastor and his wife, a revenge attack by sadistic outlaw Rufus Buck (Elba) for personal reasons that only become clear later. Buck and his gang spare the pastor’s young son, but leave him permanently marked with a crucifix scar on his brow. Jumping forward 20 years or so, the orphaned boy Nat Love (Majors) is now a grown man with a cold dish of vengeance on his mind. He now leads his own band of sharp-shooting outlaws, who unwittingly steal a mountain of cash earmarked for the jailed Buck himself, who has just been sprung from a heavily guarded train by his merciless lieutenants Trudy Smith (King) and Cherokee Bill (Stanfield).
As Buck and his gang reclaim their former fiefdom in the lawless frontier town of Redwood, Love is inexorably drawn into a fateful confrontation with the man who killed his parents. He gathers a motley team around him including his estranged ex, two-fisted saloon-bar owner Stagecoach Mary (Zazie Beetz), and hard-bitten sheriff Bass Reeves (Delroy Lindo). The escalating battle of wills between the two gangs includes bank heists, shoot-outs, betrayals and bloodbaths, all culminating in the inevitable face-to-face showdown between Buck and Love, complete with shock revelations.
The opening titles to The Harder They Fall stress that these larger-than-life characters really existed, even if the narrative is wholly fictional. Nat Love was indeed one of America’s most famous black cowboys, and has been portrayed on screen before by Ernie Hudson and Michael K. Williams. The real Rufus Buck led a multi-racial bandit gang on a murder and rape spree along the Arkansas-Oklahoma border in 1895, and was hanged a year later. Cherokee Bill, aka Crawford Goldsby, was another violent outlaw caught and hanged in 1986 while “Stagecoach” Mary Fields was a pioneering African-American female entrepreneur, Bass Reeves the first black deputy U.S. Marshal west of the Mississippi River, and so on.
The performances vary in quality. King proves reliably fierce, Stanfield is laconic cool personified, and Lindo brings old-school gravitas, but Elba’s growling bad-ass shtick is too laidback to be truly menacing. A final-act bid to give Buck some emotional hinterland feels like too little, too late. Majors also seems oddly blank as the notional hero, delivering many of his lines in a slurred mumble that many in the London Film Festival press screening struggled to comprehend. Maybe he is paying homage to Clint Eastwood’s taciturn anti-hero in all those iconic Leone movies, but he comes off as more sleepy stoner than cool-headed gunslinger. Like cosplaying tourists at the Westworld theme park, most of the main players lack conviction as authentic cowboys, their efforts not helped by a thin screenplay that has little interest in exploring any nuanced historical or political context behind the overblown macho folklore of the Old West.
Samuel and cinematographer Mihai M?laimare shoot The Harder They Fall with some impressively balletic camera moves, running 360-degree rings around gun battles and brushing windows aside for bravura telescopic zoom shots that would make Hitchcock proud. They also give the film an opulent colour scheme of bloody reds, sunset oranges, velveteen greens and rich chocolate tones, a sumptuous aesthetic that sets up a visual joke when action shifts briefly to an all-white frontier town where even the buildings are painted in pristine snowy hues. Such is the paltry level of wit here that Samuel feels obliged to explain the gag with an on-screen caption.
But even with these caveats and clunky touches, Samuel deserves credit for making such a stylish spectacle on what is just his second feature. Besides corralling so many major talents, he also composed the score alongside a Tarantino-style mixtape of hip-hop, R&B, reggae and Afrobeat royalty including Jay-Z, Lauryn Hill, Barrington Levy and Fela Kuti. Respect is also due to the production design team for including a sly visual tribute to the late Chadwick Boseman, who died last year just as this shoot began.
Director: Jeymes Samuel
Screenplay: Jeymes Samuel, Boaz Yakin
Cast: Jonathan Majors, Idris Elba, Zazie Beetz, Regina King, Delroy Lindo, LaKeith Stanfield, RJ Cyler, Danielle Deadwyler, Edi Gathegi, Deon Cole
Producers: Lawrence Bender, Shawn Carter, James Lassiter, Jeymes Samuel
Cinematography: Mihai M?laimare Jr.
Editing: Tom Eagles
Production designer: Martin Whist
Art director: Matthew Gatlin
Costume designer: Antoinette Messam
Music: Jeymes Samuel
Production company: Overbrook Entertainment (US)
Venue: London Film Festival (gala screening)
In English
130 minutes
