The Western genre was supposed to be dead. Or at least, it was supposed to be a dusty relic of the 1950s where everyone looked like John Wayne and the only people of color were caricatures. Then Jeymes Samuel dropped The Harder They Fall on Netflix, and honestly, the game changed. This wasn't just another cowboy movie; it was a loud, bloody, stylish correction of history that used a Jay-Z-produced soundtrack to bridge the gap between 1890 and the modern day.
If you’ve seen it, you remember that opening frame. It basically tells the audience that while the events are fictional, "These. People. Existed." That’s the hook. It’s not just about a revenge plot involving Nat Love and Rufus Buck. It’s about the fact that one in four cowboys in the American West were Black, a reality that Hollywood spent nearly a century trying to erase.
The Real History Behind the Harder They Fall Characters
Most people think Nat Love or Stagecoach Mary were invented for the script. They weren't. Jeymes Samuel took real historical figures who lived at completely different times and threw them into a cinematic blender. It’s a bit like an Avengers movie but for 19th-century Black icons.
Take Nat Love, played by Jonathan Majors. The real Nat Love was a legendary cowboy who wrote an autobiography in 1907 titled Life and Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in the Cattle Country as 'Deadwood Dick'. He wasn't exactly the outlaw shown in the film, but he was a master marksman. Then you have Rufus Buck, portrayed by Idris Elba with that terrifying, quiet intensity. The real Rufus Buck Gang was a multi-racial group of outlaws—part Black, part Cherokee—who went on a horrific thirteen-day crime spree in 1895. In the The Harder They Fall film, Buck is framed more as a visionary or a revolutionary, but the real-life history is much darker and less "cool."
Zazie Beetz plays Stagecoach Mary, who is arguably the coolest person in the whole story. Mary Fields was a six-foot-tall, cigar-smoking powerhouse who became the first Black woman to work as a star route mail carrier. She was known to carry a rifle and a revolver and never missed a day of work. The movie gives her a nightclub and a romantic subplot with Nat, but the real Mary was probably even tougher than the fictional version.
That Visual Style: Why It Doesn't Look Like a "Normal" Western
Westerns are usually brown. Desaturated. Dusty. This movie is the opposite.
Samuel uses a color palette that feels more like a comic book or a Quentin Tarantino flick than a traditional John Ford movie. The town of Maysville is literally painted bright white. Redwood is dripping in deep reds and golds. It’s a deliberate choice. By making the world look vibrant, the film forces you to see these characters as living, breathing people rather than sepia-toned ghosts.
The cinematography by Mihai Mălaimare Jr. leans heavily into split screens and extreme close-ups. It feels frantic. It feels alive. You’ve got these long, sweeping shots of the frontier juxtaposed with quick, rhythmic edits that match the beat of the music. It’s a music video aesthetic applied to a two-hour epic. Some critics felt it was too much style over substance, but honestly, when the style is this good, who cares? The style is the substance. It’s a reclamation of a genre that had become stagnant.
The Sound of the Frontier
You can’t talk about this movie without talking about the music. Jeymes Samuel is a musician first—performing under the name The Bullitts—and he wrote or co-wrote almost every song on the soundtrack.
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Blending reggae, hip-hop, and Ennio Morricone-style orchestral swells shouldn't work. On paper, putting a Barrington Levy track over a shootout feels like it would break the immersion. Instead, it anchors it. When "Guns Go Bang" by Kid Cudi and Jay-Z kicks in, it creates a visceral energy that a traditional fiddle-and-banjo score just couldn't reach. It tells the viewer that this story is contemporary. It’s relevant.
The music acts as a narrator. It tells us how to feel about Rufus Buck’s silence or Nat Love’s bravado. In many ways, The Harder They Fall film is a musical where the instruments are revolvers.
Addressing the Controversies and Casting Choices
No film is perfect, and this one sparked some real debate, specifically regarding colorism.
The real-life Stagecoach Mary was a dark-skinned woman. Casting Zazie Beetz, who is light-skinned, led to a lot of valid criticism from historians and fans who felt that Hollywood was once again erasing the likeness of dark-skinned Black women, even in a film meant to celebrate them. It’s a complicated conversation. While Beetz gives a fantastic performance, the disconnect between the historical Mary Fields and the cinematic one is a legitimate point of contention that shouldn't be ignored.
There’s also the question of the "Black Western" as a subgenre. We’ve had Posse (1993) and Buck and the Preacher (1972), but those were often treated as niche. Samuel’s film had a massive budget and a superstar cast including Regina King and LaKeith Stanfield. The pressure was high. Did it lean too hard into the "Cool factor" at the expense of the real struggle these people faced? Maybe. But there’s something to be said for allowing Black characters in a Western to just be "cool" outlaws without every single scene being a lecture on trauma.
Why the Ending Still Sparks Discussion
The final confrontation between Nat and Rufus isn't the shootout everyone expected. It’s a dialogue. It’s a revelation of family secrets that turns a revenge story into a tragedy.
This is where the film tries to do something deeper. It looks at the cycle of violence. Rufus Buck spends the whole movie being the "villain," but his final monologue complicates that. He views himself as a protector of Black land and a man forged by the very violence Nat is now perpetuating. It’s a messy, emotional ending that moves away from the "black hat vs. white hat" tropes of the old days.
The lingering shot of the graves and the remaining members of the gang riding off suggests a sequel, though nothing has been officially greenlit yet. The "Harder They Fall" title refers to the height from which these titans fall, and by the end, everyone has lost something.
How to Dive Deeper Into the Real Black West
If the film sparked an interest in the actual history, there are several ways to explore the facts beyond the stylized Netflix version. The movie is a gateway, not a textbook.
- Read the Source Material: Pick up a copy of The Life and Adventures of Nat Love. It’s a fascinating first-person account of the era, even if Nat was known for "stretching the truth" a bit in his stories.
- Research the Real Rufus Buck Gang: Look into the archives of the Oklahoma Historical Society. The real story of the gang’s capture and execution is a sobering look at the end of the "Wild West" era and the jurisdiction of "Hanging Judge" Isaac Parker.
- Visit the Black West Museum: The Black American West Museum & Heritage Center in Denver, Colorado, is located in the former home of Dr. Justina Ford. It’s one of the best resources for learning about the Black pioneers, miners, and cowboys who actually built the frontier.
- Watch the Influences: To see where Jeymes Samuel got his visual cues, watch Sergio Leone’s "Dollars Trilogy" or the 1970s blaxploitation Western Thomasine & Bushrod.
The legacy of The Harder They Fall film isn't just its high-octane action or its soundtrack. It’s the fact that it forced a mainstream audience to acknowledge that the American West was far more diverse than the movies had led us to believe for a century. It’s a loud, proud, and unapologetic piece of cinema that proves the Western isn't dead—it just needed a new perspective.