Video Views by Kevin J. Walker, Film Critic

Posse

My trip to the beautiful and richly historic state of Oklahoma as a guest of their tourism bureau made me cognizant of Black History of the Old West. We had settlers, card sharks, sodbusters, cattle raisers and hustlers, frontier wives, saloon ladies, scouts and hard-hearted gunslingers who’d as soon shoot you dead as look at you.

The choice for the African American History Month Video Views was an easy one. "Posse" was touted as the first Black Western, which it is most assuredly is not, not, by a long shot from a six shooter.

Just a few only from the last thirty years: "Buck and The Preacher", "Thomasine and Bushrod", "The Legend of Nigga Charlie," and the comedic "Blazing Saddles," co-written by Mel Brooks and the late Richard Pryor.

Where Peebles, the star of the science fiction cyborg film “Solo” and director of the hit "New Jack City" erred was in tampering just a touch with the basic formula of the Western's action setup. It's a given in Westerns that your band of colorful characters come together at the big shootout, where scores are settled, and Destiny rides forth to claim her victims.

There's plenty of time to kill people off in the shootout, where after two hours we've learned to like them more. Besides, it allows them to go out in a blaze of glory, with the bodies of the Bad Guys heaped up all around them, as is their due.

Think Walter Hill’s many films such as Bruce Willis in “Last Man Standing,” and of course the “The Wild Bunch” (and its modernized and Hill co-produced “Extreme Prejudice.”) Peebles also mishandled some action scenes of "New Jack City" the same way, and should check his runaway directorial excess.

Big Daddy Kane, the romantic rapper, plays the riverboat gambler Father Time, so called because of his trademark gold timepiece. He's joined by director Mario Van Peebles as Jessie Lee, the silent and resolute army lieutenant. Lee went AWOL with most of the members of the outlaw posse from Cuba during the Spanish American War in the last years of the 1800s.

Film director Charles Lane (“True Identity”) is Weezie, the nerdy aide-de-camp (and last member of the "Motesa" tribe!). Tiny Lister the former professional wrestler and co-star in the “Friday” movies is Obobo, the faithful but slow-witted shotgun-wielding enforcer. Tone Loc is the wise-cracking Angel.

The lone White member of the mostly Black Outlaw Posse is Stephen Baldwin as Little J, the grinning knife master and sort of the James Coburn-ish character who doesn't back down a jot when people try and charge him up for running with a bunch of Black original gangsters.

"The way I figure it" he says during the campfire scene when the posse chills out between action, "seems to me the only difference the White man has with the colored man is that he's scared, and people won't be when they get to know one another. Me, I ain't scared of nuthin, 'cept being bored. And running with Jesse Lee, I can guarantee you, you'll never be bored!!"

His reluctant ally Father Time tells him "You the kind who'll fart in a bathtub and turn around and try to bite the bubble." Baldwin is no stranger to Westerns, being a veteran of the TV series "The Young Riders" as Buffalo Bill Cody.

Director and star Mario Van Peebles said he didn't set out to turn the Western genre on its head, and mostly he didn't. He raided the vaults of films like Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns, and others. He succeeded -- for the most part --in making a composite Western in the old style, with a light plot with the basic formula: hard driven men with pasts and grudges to settle, a traitor in the midst, and pursued through the wide open spaces with a price on their heads by killer lawmen.

Peebles, somewhat to the film's detriment at inopportune times, adds some references to modern times while injecting some politics and social relevancy to "Posse." During a shootout Nipsy Russell's character says, (Rodney King like), "Can't we all get along?" Peebles father Melvin Van shouts "No justice, No Peace!" These mal-anachronisms detract from the flow of the story.

It is indeed ironic that the revisionist and Oscar winning Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven," and an African American Baby Boomer raised on them may go down in history as doing the most to bring back the Western.

This is a quest that Hollywood has been trying to do for years with films as diverse as "Silverado", "The Long Riders", "Young Guns" I and II, and Eastwood's last Western, "Pale Rider." Even modern films such as "Thelma & Louise" and "Extreme Prejudice" have taken on a Western cachet.

Although "Posse" apes "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid", "A Fistful of Dollars", "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly", "The Professionals," and especially "The Wild Bunch" and "The Magnificent Seven," it transgresses mightily by killing off crucial members of the Outlaw Posse long before the tumultuous battle scene.

The most notable won't be named here, but one engaging character I was sad to see go was the old guy who would cross himself after each bad guy he shot, clutching a Bible in one hand and his smoking Colt .45 in the other.

He could have provided some interesting generational contrast with the young randy trigger-happy buckaroos as they rode through the badlands. Instead, the older crew is phased in by the Townspeople, who include Pam Grier, Isaac Hayes, Chicagoan Salli Richardson, Russell, Robert Hooks, and Woody Strode as the narrator.

"Posse" more than fills the bill, but with its flaws overlooked. As a righting of the omissions in the history books of Black settlers of the West it is an achievement that needs to be emulated by other filmmakers. --KJW

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