Crucial to this effort were directors like Cecil B.
#The lone ranger movies movie
Deputy Marshal west of the Mississippi.īy the time Westerns gained wider prominence with movie audiences in the 1950s, the ubiquity of the genre’s all-white protagonists had helped fully obscure the reality of race on the American frontier.
He was played by John Wayne, one of the genre’s biggest movie stars, who in 1971 told Playboy, “I believe in white supremacy until blacks are educated to the point of responsibility.” Even the fictional character of the Lone Ranger (who originally debuted in a radio show in 1933) shares striking similarities to Bass Reeves, believed to be the first black U.S.
The famous 1956 Western epic The Searchers was based on a black man named Britt Johnson. The story of one of America’s most eminent frontiersmen, Jim Beckwourth, formed the basis for 1951’s Tomahawk, which starred a white actor even though Beckwourth was black. This practice was especially commonplace in Westerns, which relied on racist stereotypes of Native people as bloodthirsty savages and drew inspiration for stories about white heroes from the experiences of freed slaves in the West. While whitewashing remains a modern problem, it has a long history in American film: In the very first Hollywood movie, 1910’s In Old California, white actors played non-white roles. Filmmakers built a genre that hinged on racial conflict and then, in defiance of that fact, filled the silver screen with only white protagonists. Most historians and cowfolk of color agree that Hollywood is responsible for popularizing the falsehood of the all-white Wild West. When filmmakers weren’t misrepresenting other races, they were often ignoring them entirely. And yet, even today, black cowboys are fighting for recognition. In other words, people of color were not only present at the inception of the Wild West-but they were also its primary architects. Around this same time, the frontier was also populated by roughly 20,000 Chinese immigrants who contributed significantly to the development of the West, including the construction of the first Transcontinental Railroad. At that time, cowboys did the kind of hard labor that wealthy white Americans would often force others to do, meaning many were black slaves. White Americans wouldn’t be exposed to, and subsequently incorporate, cowboy culture into their ranching practices until 200 years after its inception, once westward expansion brought Anglo-colonists and African slaves into the area in the early 1800s. The recognizable cowboy fashions, technologies, and lexicon-hats, bandanas, spurs, stirrups, lariat, lasso- are all Latino inventions. And while historians don’t know exact figures, by the late 19th century roughly one in three cowboys (known as vaqueros) was Mexican. None of the first cowboys were (non-Hispanic) white. How Dickinson Became One of TV’s Most Audacious Shows Shirley LiĬowboy culture refers to a style of ranching introduced in North America by Spanish colonists in the 16th century-a time when most ranch owners were Spanish and many ranch hands were Native. Despite the admirable efforts of Westerns such as The Revenant and The Magnificent Seven, movies like Django Unchained, The Keeping Room, The Lone Ranger, and Bone Tomahawk all show how difficult it is to modernize the genre without continuing to peddle an inaccurate and exclusionary account of American history. In recent years, filmmakers have grappled with this reality to varying degrees of success. But if anything, this subversion brings the movie closer to history: The Old West and the iconic cowboys who populate it in movies were never solely white to begin with.
In addition to Washington, the “seven” include Byung-hun Lee, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, and Martin Sensmeier-all of whom subvert the conventional idea of the Western hero. Directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Denzel Washington, the 2016 version centers around a team of misfits trying to defend a town built around a gold mine. A retelling of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, the movie centers on a group of seven white men hired to protect a Mexican village being terrorized by a band of outlaws.īut a new adaptation of the film offers a notably different set of heroes. This narrow image is foundational to the genre, which includes films such as John Sturges’s 1960 classic The Magnificent Seven. Standing tall inside this cinematic shorthand is the cowboy himself, a figure commonly understood to be an excellent shot who rides horses and who, above all, is white. It draws from a well of cultural symbols meant to capture the essence of America, including the freedom of the open frontier and the righteous self-determination of man. As movie genres go, the Western is a workhorse.
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