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Despite being the most decorated director in Academy Award history, John Ford has sometimes faced criticism for his portrayal of minorities in his Western films, particularly simplistic depictions of Native Americans in films like Stagecoach and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Yet, Ford's films often confronted the bigotry of the Old West, leaving audiences to grapple with their own interpretations in works like The Searchers and Fort Apache. In 1960, he made the Western Sergeant Rutledge, a rare courtroom drama of the Old West that also smashed a few boundaries, including being the first film by a major studio to cast a Black actor, Woody Strode, in a leading role.

Black cowboy movies, while not as common as traditional Western films, have a diverse and exciting history dating back to the 1920s. From silent pictures to the Blaxploitation era, Black actors made their mark in the Western genre, leading to a new generation today. Films like "The Harder They Fall" on Netflix have ushered in a new era of Black cowboy movies, blending action, history, and star-studded casts.

Black cowboy movies aren't as common as traditional Western movies, but they are some of the most exciting and diverse installments in the beloved genre. Stretching as far back as the 1920s, Black actors began making their way into the predominantly White genre, and many of the earliest films featuring Black cowboys were silent pictures. As the Western genre grew, so too did Black involvement in them. By the 1970s, a subgenre within the Blaxploitation sphere was dedicated to Black Western movies.

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. 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.

The Western film genre is unique to a specific period and place and is, as such, instantly recognizable. The cinema helped immortalize the cowboy, rendering him, in many ways, inseparable from its cultural tradition. 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.

While some are quick to groan at every instance of colorblind casting, those...

Woody Strode as Jake in "The Professionals" (1966). (Photo: Cinema Retro Archive.)

This is too good to be true for retro movie fans. The great Woody Strode will be commemorated with a film festival at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York. Strode, a former professional athlete, was one of the first African-American actors to break the glass ceiling, appearing in supporting roles in many major films. The festival, titled "The Legend of Woody Strode", will offer a rare opportunity to see many of his films on the big screen. Here is the official press release.

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The Legend of Woody Strode

February 11–March 6, 2022

Despite the lack of opportunities for actors of color in his era, Woody Strode left a legacy worth revisiting. Strode, the six-foot-four pioneering athlete turned movie star, was born in 1914, in South Central Los Angeles, to Black and Native American parents.

One of the best yet least seen of John Sturges’ westerns couples a fine screenplay with strong star perfs and superb direction: the straightforward story builds tension throughout. Kirk Douglas is a sheriff out for both justice and revenge and Anthony Quinn is the he-bull rancher who stands in his way: the guilty party is Quinn’s son. It looks sensational in VistaVision, with a fine music score by Dimitri Tiomkin — it’s a pleasure all the way through, with strong support from Carolyn (swoon) Jones, Earl Holliman, Brian Hutton and Brad Dexter.

Last Train from Gun Hill

Region-free Blu-ray

Viavision [Imprint] 101

1959 / Color / 1:78 widescreen (VistaVision) / 95 min. / Street Date December 29, 2021 / Available from Imprint and Amazon / 39.95

Starring: Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, Carolyn Jones, Earl Holliman, Brad Dexter, Brian G. Hutton, Ziva Rodann, Bing Russell, Val Avery, Walter Sande, John Anderson, Dabbs Greer, Ty Hardin, Glenn Strange, Julius Tannen, Sid Tomack.

Cinematography:...

“While the events of this story are fictional…These. People. Existed.” Thus begins Jeymes Samuel’s western “The Harder They Fall,” currently streaming on Netflix. The period picture is populated with 19th century Black icons including Nat Love (Jonathan Majors), a former enslaved cowboy, Mary Fields (Zazie Beetz), the first Black star-route mail carrier in the U.S., and Rufus Black (Idris Elba), the head of the ruthless multi-racial gang of bank robbers.

“The Harder They Fall” is the first major Western led by a Black cast since Mario Van Peebles 1993 “Posse.” The director, though, told the L.A. Times that “The Harder They Fall” shouldn’t be described as simply a “Black” Western. “It’s just a story about these people in their own world, just like ‘Rio Bravo” is a story about John Wayne and Dean Martin in their own world,” Samuel said. “These aren’t white Westerns or white movies,...

There are few things in this world more warm and cozy than digging into a humanistic John Ford picture. Few things more downright entertaining. I’m inclined to call Ford my favorite filmmaker of all time, if I felt it necessary to make such distinctions. Steamboat Round the Bend was to be, for all intents and purposes, a minor Ford experience for me; a film one watches when they’ve run out of the “better” Ford and wanna see what else he made in between and around Stagecoach and The Searchers. Steamboat Round the Bend came four years prior to Stagecoach – the film inevitably referred to as more or less the starting point of Ford’s lucrative Western stint and, more egregious and wrongheadedly, when he started to get “good”. Not only had he made good films before Stagecoach, he’d made better films Than Stagecoach before Stagecoach. He’d...

The “adult” Western – as it would come to be called – was a long time coming. A Hollywood staple since the days of The Great Train Robbery (1903), the Western offered spectacle and action set against the uniquely American milieu of the Old West – a historical period which, at the dawn of the motion picture industry, was still fresh in the nation’s memory. What the genre rarely offered was dramatic substance.

Early Westerns often adopted the same traditions of the popular Wild West literature and dime novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries producing, as a consequence, highly romantic, almost purely mythic portraits the Old West. Through the early decades of the motion picture industry, the genre went through several creative cycles, alternately tilting from fanciful to realistic and back again. By the early sound era, and despite such serious efforts as The Big Trail (1930) and The Virginian (1929), Hollywood Westerns were,...

One of my earliest Movie Posters of the Week, a few years ago, was for a stunning poster for Bresson’s Pickpocket. Back then I noted that it was “designed by one Christian Broutin. It turns out that Broutin (who was born in 1933 and only 26 when he designed this) also designed the conceptually similar poster for Jules and Jim, another of my all-time favorite French affiches.” In the comments somebody asked if I knew anything else about Broutin but I did not and could not find out much more on the web other than that he was also a children’s book illustrator.

A few months ago I came across another great poster attributed to Broutin and in my search for a better quality image for the poster I discovered his website (“Welcome to the site of Christian Broutin, maxi-realist painter, illustrator, creator of stamps”) which told me that Christian Broutin is alive and well,...

Woody Strode in John Ford‘s Sergeant Rutledge I’m not at all familiar with Woody Strode‘s film career. I believe that most people aren’t either. And that is an excellent reason to check out Turner Classic Movies‘ Woody Strode Day this Thursday, August 5, as part of TCM’s "Summer Under the Stars" series. I’ve seen only two of TCM’s twelve movies featuring Strode: John Ford‘s swan song, the much-panned 7 Women (1966), and Sergio Leone‘s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). I actually enjoyed 7 Women, which features a great cast including Anne Bancroft (replacing ailing Patricia Neal), Margaret Leighton, Betty Field, Mildred Dunnock, Anna Lee and Flora Robson. The widely revered Once Upon a Time in the West has never been one of my favorite Westerns, but it does have my all-time favorite movie theme music, courtesy of the masterful Ennio Morricone. And I...

TCM‘s annual Summer Under the Stars TV Festival runs throughout August, and – essentially, TCM picks an overlooked star deserving of a tribute, and gives them one. Tomorrow’s, August 5th’s, celebration goes to Woody Strode, the athlete turned actor, famous for roles in classics like Once Upon A Time In The West, and Sergeant Rutledge, amongst others.

Strode died in 1994, but his memory lives on those films he had roles in, many of which TCM will be showing all day tomorrow and night, from 6Am in the morning, staring with 1951’s The Lion Hunters, through 3:30Am the following morning, on the 6th, ending with 1965’s Genghis Khan – 12 films in total will be screened.

I don’t have cable, so I’ll be missing it all. However, you don’t have to, if you do have cable. Regardless, most, if not all of them should be on Netflix.

Director John Ford, perhaps one of the greatest directors ever in films was also one of the most complex. He started in career in films during the silent era as an actor and a stuntman, even playing one of the horse riding Klansman in the climax of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of A Nation and directed some 125 movies in his career until his last film Seven Women in 1965. And among those films are many films still today established as genuine classics such as How Green Was My Valley, Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine and The Grapes of Wrath (The Searchers, considered by many as his masterpiece, is to me a boring, rambling, vastly overrated movie.)

But as with many directors of the period, his films definitely have their share of outrageous stereotypes, but during the last decade of his filmmaking career Ford began to make films to sort of atone for his past sins.