Where have all the black cowboys gone?
In Hell on the Border, a B-movie western set in Arkansas, Bass Reeves saves the life of a judge, tracks down a dangerous outlaw, and is appointed deputy US marshal. So far, so familiar. What makes this interesting is that Reeves (1838-1910) was not just a real historical character, but the first black deputy west of the Mississippi River.
And the film doesn’t tell the half of it. Reeves was a runaway slave who sought refuge in Native American territories, where he learned the Cherokee, Creek and Seminole languages. Later, as a marshal, he would sometimes wear disguises to sneak up on the white bandits who operated with impunity in the otherwise lawless region; this was when he wasn’t chasing them long-distance on horseback, using Native American tricks to keep his mounts fresher than those of the men he was pursuing. At his retirement in 1909, he claimed to have arrested more than 3,000 felons, never sustaining serious injury despite close calls in which his hat and belt were shot off.
It’s a career that is crying out for the Hollywood treatment, the way the lives of Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok or Billy the Kid have been enshrined in American mythology via a multitude of films. But despite a committed performance by London-born David Gyasi in the central role, Hell on the Border is more of a well-meaning sidebar than a satisfying cinematic experience. It’s a label that could equally be applied to the handful of other westerns featuring Reeves, or other gallant but flawed attempts to put black cowboys centre-stage, such as Mario Van Peebles’ Posse (1993) and the TV film Buffalo Soldiers (1997).
After the American civil war, a life in the saddle offered unprecedented freedom to former slaves, while the teamwork required for cattle drives provided a measure of equality on the trail. When cattle drives were phased out by the use of the railroad, black cowboys, as well as white ones, found employment in travelling rodeos and wild west shows. In the old west, one in four cowboys was black, but you’d never guess it to look at Hollywood westerns. While the anti-woke brigade is quick to froth at the mouth when David Oyelowo is cast as Javert in Les Misérables, Zendaya
as Mary Jane Watson in SpiderMan or Dev Patel as David Copperfield, those same cries of “Stop all the tampering with truth, history and literature!” have been strangely silent about the way that, for the past century, Hollywood has already been practising a form of “colour-blind casting” by reassigning the exploits of black characters to white ones, and reframing the history of the wild west as an illustration of “manifest destiny”, a white triumphalist agenda from which non-white people have been erased.
According to historian Art T Burton, Reeves was the inspiration for The Lone Ranger, but that’s not the only instance of black history being whitewashed by popular culture. Alan Le May’s novel The Searchers was reportedly inspired by African American cowboy Britt Johnson, who tracked down his wife and daughters after they were kidnapped by Comanches. John Ford’s 1956 film of the same name starred John Wayne as the protagonist. Everyone knows The Searchers; few have seen Black Fox, a pretty good 1995 TV movie in which Johnson is played by Tony Todd. Intrepid trailblazing ex-slave Nat Love, author of a flamboyant autobiography, was one of a number of historical figures claiming to have been the inspiration for Deadwood Dick – inevitably played by white actors in a series of silent shorts and a 1940 feature. Celebrated black bulldogger Bill Pickett invented the technique (now banned) of wrestling cattle to the ground by biting the cow’s lip, but it was his one-time colleagues Tom Mix and the part-Cherokee Will Rogers who went on to find fame in early westerns. Bose Ikard, an ex-slave who became a cattle drive pioneer alongside Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, was allegedly the model for the character of Joshua Deets in Larry McMurtry’s novel Lonesome Dove. In the excellent 1989 TV adaptation, he was played by Danny Glover, but relegated to second fiddle to top-billed Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. Glover had been more of an equal partner to Scott Glenn, Kevin Kline and Kevin Costner in Lawrence Kasdan’s enjoyable 1985 pastiche western Silverado.
And so it goes: black western history repeatedly erased, or, at best, marginalised. But black cowboys weren’t entirely absent from Hollywood in the 1930s. Among the era’s “race movies” – films with all-black casts aimed at segregated audiences – were westerns starring Herb Jeffries (1913-2014), known as The Sepia Singing Cowboy or The Bronze Buckaroo. Jeffries was born Umberto Alexander Valentino to an Irish mother and a father of mixed Sicilian-French-Italian-Moorish roots, sang with the Earl Hines and Duke Ellington Orchestras, and later married legendary burlesque artist Tempest Storm. To play the black cowboy hero of films such as Harlem on the Prairie (1937), the first “all-coloured” western musical, he had to darken his skin with makeup, but he identified himself as African American. “We had nobody representing us, least of all in the cowboy pictures,” Jeffries told the Los Angeles Times in 2003. “All we had was Stepin Fetchit. I felt that we could do better, that we could provide heroes for youngsters.”
At a Bafta lecture in 2018, Spike Lee said: “Fuck John Wayne and John Ford!” Yet Ford was the first director to cast a black actor – former UCLA football star Woody Strode – in a leading role in a mainstream western, Sergeant Rutledge (1960). “John Ford put classic words in my mouth,” Strode later told the New York Times. “You never seen a Negro come off a mountain like John Wayne before.” In Richard Brooks’ The Professionals (1966), Strode received equal screen time, if not equal billing, to Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin and Robert Ryan. But he also made a mark in spaghetti westerns, notably Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), in which he plays one of the trio of gunmen loitering at the railway station to greet Charles Bronson.
In the 1960s, black actors began to appear in more westerns, if only as barmen, such as Yaphet Kotto holding his own against Dean Martin and Robert Mitchum in Henry Hathaway’s 5 Card Stud (1968), or in oddly peripheral roles, such as Sidney Poitier in his first oater, Ralph Nelson’s unexpectedly gruesome Duel at Diablo (1966). Poitier made up for it when he took over the directing reins of Buck and the Preacher (1972), in which he plays the uncontested lead: a wagonmaster leading emancipated slaves (known as “Exodusters”) from Louisiana to Kansas to escape white raiders hired by plantation owners. En route he forms a Butch and Sundance-style relationship with a bogus preacher played by Harry Belafonte.
Buck and the Preacher did only lukewarm business; mainstream audiences preferred their black cowboys played for laughs in Blazing Saddles (1974), though it’s arguably the white folks’ prejudices that are sent up more than the reluctant black sheriff. Richard Pryor, one of Mel Brooks’s co-scripters, was originally supposed to play the role, but the studio deemed him uninsurable and Cleavon Little was cast instead. A year later, Pryor co-starred in another comedy western, Adiós Amigo (1975), written, directed by and co-starring blaxploitation superstar Fred Williamson, but the results were disappointing.
Williamson was one of the ex-NFL footballers following Strode into film roles, including in blaxploitation westerns such as The Legend of
Nigger Charley (1972), the first of three films defiantly using the N-word in the title; “Controversy is what sells,” said Williamson. In the enjoyable but lightweight Take a Hard Ride (1975), he co-starred with fellow footballer-turned-actor Jim Brown; black martial arts artist Jim Kelly, who had co-starred with Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon, also shows up as a mute Native American.
It wasn’t until the second sequel, Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969), that the seven included a black actor (the great Bernie Casey in his film debut) in their ranks. So perhaps it’s a sign of improvement that, while westerns are thin on the ground these days, in the 2016 remake The Magnificent Seven are led by Denzel Washington, and Jamie Foxx and Samuel L Jackson get top billing in, respectively, Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2015).
But will Hollywood ever restore the real black cowboy to his rightful role in the western lore from which he has been ousted? There’s no shortage of action-packed subject matter; screenwriters could do worse than take their pick of the larger than life characters in Tricia Martineau Wagner’s book Black Cowboys of the Old West. How about lovable rogue Isom Dart, whose cattle-rustling career was cut short when he was shot dead by ruthless bounty hunter Tom Horn? Or Robert Lemmons, who successfully tamed herds of wild mustangs by pretending to be a horse?
Perhaps Bass Reeves’s hour has finally come. There’s a HBO miniseries in development, as well as an Amazon Studios biopic, to be directed by Chloé Zhao. Keep your fingers crossed for him.
Hell on the Border is on Digital Download now and on DVD 16 March
(Vin Diesel) actually fuses little more than RoboCop to Wolverine. The script goes through the factory-issue beats for any star vehicle about a supersoldier stripped of his memory and converted into a killing machine, an oddly specific setup to be so well trodden. There’s a loving wife as silent as she is blond, an eccentric murderer dancing around to Psycho Killer by Talking Heads, the barked vow to find and destroy the men responsible. After the first act winds up and our hero gets reborn, the lab techs responsible for converting Garrison into the unstoppable force known as Bloodshot mutter about how they went strictly by the book in concocting this scenario.
Unfortunately, the rest of the film fails to do anything with this trite simulation beyond plug it in to a story equally bereft of imagination. While sinister robot-handed scientist Emil Harting (Guy Pearce) and his lackeys pull the digital wool over Garrison’s brain’s eyes, their “reality” feels no realer. Everyone speaks in a pseudo-techno dialect that only breaks up the long strings of jargon with pat affirmations of thin archetypes. Garrison gains the obligatory Sturdy Female Ally in fellow augmentee KT (Eiza González), and a flavorless rival in the cybernetically enhanced Dalton (Sam Heughan). The film doubles up on tokenized comic relief, between bad nerd Eric (Siddharth Dhananjay) and good nerd Wilfred (Lamorne Morris, doing a dreadful and inexplicable English accent).
They’re all taken to school by Diesel, outdoing the entire cast in terms of sheer magnetism even with part of his character’s brain turned off. He delivers his every line with the gravitas of a platoon leader preparing his troops for certain death, and his rubble-gargled voice goes a long way toward selling it. His physical attributes prove a great boon to the film at large, particularly in the pair of standout fight scenes mounting the lone argument for this film’s existence. Diesel has the build and gait of a person who could conceivably be the recipient of a bionic boost. His punches look like how they sound. The standout sequence, a slow-mo ballet involving an overturned flour truck and a fistful of crimson flares, brings out his brutality via hypersaturated music-video expressionism.
That constitutes the height of Wilson’s stylistic flair, the overall lack of which betrays him as a VFX technician first and rookie director second. It’s not hard to see why he was tapped for the job, CGI showcase that it is. He milks that skill set for all it is worth, from the many synthetic limbs to one impressive shot in which an Italian port vista materializes from digital nothingness. He’s never more in his element than when a computer geek rotates a 3D holo-model of an environment he’s building; in fact, this qualifies as the sole moment in which the film evinces a lived-in, authoritative perspective. Wilson’s direction otherwise hews on the side of the expected, staging each scene as if he’s trying to create minimal obtrusions while the post-production team does their stuff.
A report last year announced Valiant Comics’ plan to build a connected universe around their intellectual property, making Bloodshot the vanguard of a grittier counterpart to the Marvel-industrial complex. That would explain why Diesel doesn’t assume the character’s trademark pallid skin and scarlet eyeballs until the climax, along with the mercenary tinge of an ending that shamelessly sets itself up to be built on. Franchises must be earned, by putting forth something that audiences could conceivably see themselves spending hours on over a course of years. Aside from the singular brawn of its leading man, this would-be springboard has nothing much worth launching. It’s a stack of wormed-over action tropes, and to make matters worse, the movie knows it – and yet does not know enough to spare us its missteps in the first place. Our collective memories of Wilson’s blunt-force feature debut won’t last much longer than Garrison’s.
Bloodshot is released in the US and UK on 13 March
tional and sad in his music than aggressive.
“Because we were both around the same age, we were maturing at the same time – under totally different circumstances but everyone’s human and we go through the same problems. We go through the same struggles becoming young men and maturing into the people we’re going to become. It’s inspiring that he still managed to do all that. He definitely matured more than I have at this point.
“When X died, I decided to delete my Twitter temporarily because I knew there was going to be a negative backlash. I really didn’t want to see the terrible things people were going to say about him. His name was completely ruined. It’s such a tragedy, what happened to him.”
Juice WRLD
Aspen, 25, Charlottesville, Virginia: “A lot of people who won’t give certain rappers’ music a chance will label them mumble rap, but if you actually dig into their message and take in their content, they cover depression, drug abuse, mental health. Juice WRLD, I like him and X and Lil Peep because they got me through some of the darkest times in my life. And Juice, I could relate to him because we had almost the same problems. He had a really special place in my heart.
“I’ve had similar substance abuse struggles in my past and the message that he was sending is that he attacked addiction and tied it in with mental health. He hit it right on the head – you could understand him and understand that it’s not a choice. Once this demon has a hold of you, it turns you into something that’s not yourself. Juice WRLD understood addiction because he was addicted to drugs. A lot of other people won’t really relate to it, call him an addict, a junkie, shit like that. But real people who had to go through it can really identify. And then the music being that quality makes it that much more digestible. If you actually open your mind up and see, this was a talented kid making classic records.”
Jesse, 24, Shreveport, Louisiana: “I started out listening to heavy metal and stuff like that. Suicideboys were my way into the modern rap scene because they mixed rap and metal. Through them I found out about Lil Peep. I was going through a really bad depression at the time due to the situation I was living in. The music and the lyrics that he sang about his own depression and own anxiety, it was very easy to connect with. Being around my age as well – he died at 21 [in 2017] and I’m 24 now – it was having a connection with someone your age, going through the same process you are, and feeling the same things you are.
“It definitely hit me really hard when he died. I have three Lil Peep tattoos and I had just gotten my first one. I was bingeing his music all the time. He was the first and only celebrity whose death I truly cried over, because it felt like losing a loved one. When celebrities die, they’re just celebrities, you’ve seen their movies and stuff like that but you’ve no connection to them.
“Peep’s music connected me to him. Even though I didn’t know him as a person, I felt like I knew him. It definitely felt like a personal loss, rather than a celebrity death.”
Nipsey Hussle
Rosecrans Vic, 27, Los Angeles, California: “Nipsey Hussle was like the finish line for LA. He embodied what everybody would want to accomplish one day, whether they worked at a clothing store or whether they were a rapper – he checked all those boxes. He came from nothing. That’s why it was such a big loss – because everyone looked up to him so much.
“Nipsey was visible in his community. He touched real people’s lives every day. He didn’t just start to make money and disappear into the Hollywood Hills. He stuck around his community and made it a point to push ownership and unification. I used to go to his store and see him there. You could shake his hand and he’d tell you he appreciates you for pulling up. He had so much respect across the board from rival gangs, from everybody: ‘We can listen to his music even if we’re enemies.’ Everyone respected his business acumen – knowing he came from a place similar to them and he didn’t go to college, everything was self-taught. The way he died was so tragic. It just caught everyone by surprise.
“A lot of people say Los Angeles is not like a traditional city because it’s so spread out. But I feel like people like Nipsey and Kobe [Bryant] bring the city together, in life and death. When Nipsey passed, when Kobe passed, what part of LA you were from didn’t matter. We’re all from LA, we’re all grieving together. It didn’t matter if you’d never been to South Central – we all felt it the same. They really brought the city together because everybody roots for the Lakers. And everybody in LA who likes hip-hop, you’d never find somebody who hated Nipsey. I don’t think that’s just because he’s gone now. There was nothing to dislike. If you didn’t like the music, you respected the hustle.”