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The Curator of Culture In Netflix’s The Harder They Fall , director-writer-producer Jeymes Samuel subtly highlights hypocrisy—with humor and buckets of blood By Ca ro l Bada r acco Padge t t T he bigger they are, the hard- er they fall. That’s how the saying goes. But the con- cept is not as clear-cut as it seems on the surface. And that’s what British film- maker and musician Jeymes
Samuel’s first screenplay and directo- rial debut invite viewers to consider. His film, a Black Western, and his message (told with real-life figures from the American West, brought together in a time when it’s likely that they actually never met) includes an all-star cast: Idris Elba as Rufus Buck; Jonathan Majors as Nat Love; Regina King as Trudy Smith; Zazie Beetz as Stagecoach Mary; LaKeith Stanfield as Cherokee Bill; JR Cyler as Jim Beckworth; Danielle Deadwyler as Cathay Williams; Edi Gathegi as
Regina King
Idris Elba
Jeymes Samuel
Bill Pickett; Delroy Lindo as Bass Reeves; Deon Cole as Wiley Escoe; Damon Wayans Jr. as Monroe Grimes; and the list goes on and on. In the opening scene of The Harder They Fall , a preacher, his wife, and their 11-year-old son (actor Chase Dillon) are sitting down to dinner. As the boy strums a little guitar, his father gently chastises, “Not at the table, son.” His mother exchanges a “you know your father will say something every time you pull that” kind of look with the boy, and then swats away his hand when he tries to grab a dinner roll before the family says grace. What is a conventionally familiar and mundane scene for the viewer quickly turns into a generator of tension and terror as there’s an ominous knock on the door and the preacher gets up to answer it. As he does, in comes Buck (Elba), his face never shown, only his dual golden revolvers. In the flash of an instant, it’s apparent that the preacher knows the golden-revolver man, while his wife and son know only that impending doom has knocked upon their door and entered their home. In a swift and gruesome act, the golden gunslinger kills the mother first, the father second, and approaches the screaming boy with a knife blade, only to be followed by a title that reads “Salinas, Texas Some Time Later”. “It’s a tale about revenge,” notes Samuel, the brother of Grammy Award-winning musician Seal and a singer- songwriter himself, known as The Bullitts.
On The Treatment podcast hosted by Elvis Mitchell, Samuel continues, “[It’s] about a child that has his parents killed in front of him.” The boy, too, grows up a gunslinger, hunting the mysterious man who killed his parents. Samuel adds, “But for me, really, it’s a love story rooted in the cycle of violence that we find ourselves all too often in. And that’s what the movie at its root it all about.” Ultimately, the golden-revolver killer, Buck, and his gang are set up as the film’s villains. Yet all throughout the movie, Love, now a grown man with a cross that was carved into his forehead that fateful night as a child, is seeking revenge and operating from a place of bloody desperation with his own ruth- less gang. The bigger they are, the harder they fall—as Samuel artfully showcases how the venom of violence affects everyone involved, even the one time innocent. “The violence leads you nowhere but the destination of violence,” Samuel explains on The Treatment . “There’s no happy ending at the end of violence; someone’s always gonna lose. And in the end, that energy comes back to you.” In terms of the larger picture for society, he adds, “I really wanted to focus on the carnage that happens within our own communities… without preaching.”
Jonathan Majors and LaKeith Stanfield
Photos courtesy of Netflix
The ending of The Harder They Fall expertly illustrates this idea of violence coming full circle. And it’s a conclusion that must be individually experienced. Read: watch it for yourself and note who’s still standing at the end. What Samuel is really asking the viewer to do, he said on The Treatment, is “study ourselves and why we call particular people bad guys and particular people good guys. If you look at it from one aspect, it’s almost like an hourglass at the end of the movie; tip the hourglass upside down and watch the sand spill out from the other direction.” When all is said and done, Samuel is making sure that we as a culture see our gravitation towards violence in a telling light. One that’s ages old and still shining in plain sight.
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