Since its Hollywood heyday a century ago, the western has been a white-dominated genre under the guise of “historical accuracy.” But according to the Smithsonian, despite the myths peddled in popular culture, one in four cowboys in the Old West was Black. Jeymes Samuel, in his directorial debut, aims to right the wrongs of this representation with his new Netflix western The Harder They Fall.
The opening title cards point out that, while the story is fictional, all the characters are based on real-life historical figures. Samuel commits The Harder They Fall to providing Black stars like Jonathan Majors, Zazie Beetz, and Lakeith Stanfield with the kind of triumphant gun-toting moments that have previously been reserved for John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Henry Fonda.
The Harder They Fall opens like countless spaghetti western classics. A peaceful homestead on the frontier is interrupted by a ruthless outlaw, who kills a young boy’s parents in front of him. Like Charles Bronson’s Harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West or John Phillip Law’s Bill Meceita in Death Rides a Horse, that boy grows up to become a sharpshooting gunslinger: Nat Love, played by Majors. When the outlaw’s gang springs him from prison, Love reassembles his old gang to seek revenge.
While The Harder They Fall may be a more or less standard western, that’s okay. Not every modern-day western needs to be a bleak deconstruction of the genre like Unforgiven or The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. In a world where a western only comes along a couple of times a decade, it’s refreshing to see one that just wants to have fun.
Samuel may not reinvent the wheel, but he’s made a pretty darn great wheel. The director clearly has a deep love for the genre and – like Sergio Leone when he made Once Upon a Time in the West – he’s collected all his favorite archetypes and plot points in an affectionate cinematic love letter to westerns. Motifs like saloon brawls, armed standoffs, and old-timey trains billowing steam haven’t felt this vibrant or alive in years.
The ensemble cast of The Harder They Fall includes some of the biggest and most revered actors working today. Majors and his co-stars back up Samuel’s slick directorial style with phenomenal performances. Idris Elba gives a scene-stealing turn as the villainous Rufus Buck. Elba typically plays lovable heroes, or even antiheroes like The Suicide Squad’s Bloodsport, but he leans as heavily into the unbridled menace of Buck as he did with his unforgettable turn as Shere Khan in The Jungle Book. He manages to look suave while ordering a mass execution. As Buck’s partner-in-crime “Treacherous” Trudy Smith, Regina King similarly sheds her usual relatable nuance to let loose with the role of a cold-blooded killer who dryly delivers one-liners like, “This is some unscrupulous s***.”
Samuel got his start as a musician under the stage name The Bullitts, so it makes a lot of sense that his first feature carries a hypnotic rhythm. The soundtrack is one of The Harder They Fall’s greatest assets, replacing the operatic orchestrations of Morricone with the soul, reggae, and hip-hop stylings of such artists as Kid Cudi, Ms. Lauryn Hill, Koffee, and producer Jay-Z.
With shootouts, train robberies, and chases on horseback, the western is one of Hollywood’s funnest genres. But since Black-led westerns usually revolve around slavery, they tend to have a depressing overtone. By eschewing this historical context, The Harder They Fall is free to bask in the genre’s sense of pure escapism without the trappings of real-world atrocities. The characters are ex-slaves, but the movie doesn’t present them as ex-slaves; it presents them as cowboys and outlaws. The Harder They Fall has the exaggerated blood splatters and pulpy dialogue of a Tarantino movie without his cavalier use of racial slurs.
The cinematographers and editors of Netflix originals like The Kissing Booth franchise can often phone in their work because it’s just going to streaming as opposed to the big screen, but The Harder They Fall is wonderfully cinematic. Visual flourishes like split-screens, crash zooms, planimetric staging, and glorious Peckinpah-style slow-motion during the gunfight sequences bring the movie to life. Every character is sharply realized, every action scene is finely tuned, and the climactic set-piece succeeds at topping everything that came before it (and then some).
While The Harder They Fall isn’t a game-changing masterpiece, it is a terrific western. The genre has struggled to find popularity in the 21st century, save for a couple of isolated hits, but The Harder They Fall just might be fun, stylish, and compelling enough to remind audiences (and the Hollywood powers that be who decide which movies get made) how great the genre can be when it’s firing on all cylinders with a passionate visionary at the helm.
The Harder They Fall
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- Release Date
- November 3, 2021
After Rufus Buck (Idris Elba) is released from prison, Nat Love (Jonathan Majors) brings his gang back together to defeat his enemy. Starring alongside Majors and Elba in The Harder They Fall are Zazie Beetz, Edi Gathegi, R.J. Cyler, Regina King, and LaKeith Stanfield. The Western was released in select theaters on October 22, 2021, and released on Netflix on November 3, 2021.