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Posse
Starring and
directed by Melvin Van Peebles
A western featuring black actors,
making the point that half the cowboys in the old west were black. Van Peebles plays a Spanish American war soldier who, with
five friends, goes AWOL from his sadistic commander and heads west to
avenge the death of his father. Eventually the sadistic commander catches
up with him, and Van Peebles' character must
also confront the equally sadistic white sheriff. Meanwhile, we learn that
his father had led a group of people to found an all black town
called Freemanville and had urged them to
educate themselves before he was lynched. The town still stands, though
threatened by the white sheriff and the corruption of the leading black
official.
The movie is loud and fast paced,
ladling out blood by the bucketful. It is reminiscent of Van Peebles' "New Jack City" and similar films
by Spike Lee and others. Some reviewers have thought that this pace was
inappropriate for a western, that it obscured the story. I felt it was,
well, a black western, told as non-Christian African Americans themselves
chose to tell it. Nothing of God here. The main message of the film is
that you have to take control of things for yourself, by force
if necessary, and don't allow anyone to "dis"
you. It's a ghetto movie set outside the ghetto, with ghetto values.
Of course, we should also observe
through this film that the ghetto values are not terribly different from
the values of that "old west" which has traditionally been
glamorized as a part of white history. That may make us more sympathetic
to the plight of urban blacks today. Perhaps, without condoning their
bellicose spirit, we can understand them better by comparing them to
the families that populated the lawless western communities. These townspeople,
like modern inner-city dwellers, often lived where they did out of
economic necessity, and with considerable courage.
I felt that I learned here some aspects of the black story that I hadn't heard before. For that reason, particularly, I recommend the film.