I have taken, in my time, a lot of grief for unapologetically loving Posse. I am not sure as to why.
It certainly can’t be because the movie isn’t entertaining. With a wealth of excellent performances from Mario Van Peebles, Big Daddy Kane, Tiny Lister, Billy Zane (as the crazy evil white dude) and Stephen Baldwin (as the crazy good white dude) and many others – including the usual Peebles brigade of former blaxploitation stars, this time around casting Pam Grier, Isaac Hayes and Peebles’ father Melvin – the acting in this Western is definitely up to snuff. (Amusing: current Black Panther writer Reginald Hudlin shows up as an extra.) The action sequences are excellent (as can be expected from Peebles’s direction), and the plot is perfectly decent. Okay, maybe the bits with the golden bullets are a touch melodramatic, but they also add a pleasant larger-than-life, mythic aspect to the movie.
Plus – and this cannot be underrated – the movie addresses a major complaint I have with Westerns, which is to say their whiteness. There were a lot of black people headed west during the post-Civil-War period, but in just about every Western movie you find a dearth of black people – short of Morgan Freeman’s turn in Unforgiven I’m hard-pressed to think of any offhand. This sort of thing is forgivable in earlier westerns like High Noon, but it’s something that continued way longer than it should have; even when movies like Silverado and Tombstone had token Mexicans (mostly because sloppy-looking banditos in sombreros with guns are a staple of the Western, for good or ill), there was always a conspicuous lack of black people. And that is lame.
Some have criticized Posse for being an overreaction to this, in the “oh so you’re not going to have black people in your Westerns well I’ll make a Western with all black people, how do you like them apples” variety. They have a tiny bit of a point, but given the cinematic situation with westerns and blacks, it’s not a very big point, and moreover it’s just plain harping considering that Posse isn’t just cinematic affirmative action but a damned entertaining movie in its own right. When Stephen Baldwin’s crazy white boy points out, quite reasonably, that “I ain’t ever personally enslaved nobody,” Peebles gives him ups that the argument doesn’t necessarily even deserve. That’s because Peebles, in addition to writing a damn fine oater, also wants to be fairminded.
But so what if he is? This is a movie with black cowboys quoting poetry and Scripture while they shoot the bad guys, with Stephen Baldwin throwing knives at people (this long predates Stephen Baldwin’s born-again phase, for those wondering), and Billy Zane wearing an eyepatch because he is EEEEEEVIL. It is good goddamned fun. I can understand not liking Westerns as a genre, because not everybody likes cowboys. But if you do like Westerns, why you would not like Posse is beyond me.
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See, this is an awesome western, and not just because Billy Zane is fiercely hot (a fact I notice that you left out). It seems a lot more realistic to me than Kevin Costner’s “I’m such an awesome wimpy white-eyes even the Indians dig me” egofest in Dances With Wolves.
I just wanted to point out that one of the best characters in Silverado was played by Danny Glover, and Joe Seneca and Lynn Whitfield as his father and sister were pretty damn good, too. So while you may have a point about black people missing from westerns, Silverado is probably not the best example to use.
Your point about Silverado is well taken, although I think Glover didn’t get enough screentime.
Posse is and ALWAYS will be GODSDAMNED AWESOME…
Your point about Silverado is well taken, although I think Glover didn’t get enough screentime.
Indeed. We could have used just a teensy bit less slow character development with Kevin Kline, and a little more of, “I don’t want to kill you, and you don’t want to be dead.”
I almost always think that Glover doesn’t get enough screentime. In the Lethal Weapon series, in Witness…he’s always so wonderfully understated that he leaves me thinking, “I want to see more…” In a good way.
Keith David was in “The Quick and the Dead.” Pretty much a token black guy role, but still, he was in it. Do people take that movie seriously as a western?
Keith David doesn’t count because when Keith David shows up in a movie you should just get out a stopwatch and time how long it takes for his character to die.
You’re also overlooking Woody Strode, who was an awesome (if admittedly limited) presence in a bunch of classic Westerns, including “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” Probably his most badasstical role is in “The Professionals,” with Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, and Lee F***ing Marvin; Strode gets to fire dynamite arrows at stuff and blow it up good, in addition to kicking an entire variety pack’s worth of ass. “The Professionals” is as good as B movies get, with complicated characters, a clever plot, some brilliant lines, and Jack Palance as a Mexican dude. Trust me, it’s basically everything you want out of a Western, up to and including Claudia Cardinale.
It took a season and a half for any black people to show up in Deadwood, though the town had a large Chineses population.
what about Blazing Saddles…seem to remember that movie basically being all about blacks in the west…well sort of…also Posse is awesome.
There was a “black Western” that Sidney Potier directed, starring himself and Harry Belafonte, that is quite good but whose title I forget. It’s from the 70s. There was also a black guy who popped up in some of John “I don’t like Negroes but don’t tell anyone” Wayne’s movies time and again. He is also one of the three men waiting for the train at the beginning of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. And, as somebody else has pointed out, Blazing Saddles was about blacks in the West. “Where all the white women at?” Still cracks me up everytime.
But you’re right. Not enough blacks in Westerns. I didn’t see either of the most recent Westerns (the remake of 3:10 to Yuma and the remake of I Shot Jesse James) but I assume they don’t have a lot of black people in them either.