POSSE
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1993 Frank Maloney
POSSE is a film directed by Mario Van Peebles and written by Sy Richardson and Dario Scardapane. The cast includes Mario Van Peebles, Stephen Baldwin, Charles Lane, and Billy Zane. Rated R for violence, sex, and nudity.
POSSE is an MTV film that poses as a major antidote to the traditional lack of black people in Western movies. The story of blacks in the West, the black cowboys, the black homesteaders, the black soldiers (called buffalo soldiers by the Indians), and the rest, remains to be told. Mario Van Peebles has taken an important, and mostly unknown, story and trivialized it with an overproduced and underwritten action film.
For one thing, POSSE's writers might have bothered doing a little research. They misuse the word posse by making it mean "gang" instead of "an armed band with legal authority." They have the action begin with the Spanish-American War (1898). Then the story takes the so-called posse beyond the frontier. Piffle! In one of the landmarks of U.S. historical study, Frederick Jackson Turner in the 1893 address "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" established that the frontier had died twenty years before. Then once the posse have gone beyond the frontier, they must take a fearsome shortcut through Indian territory. Never mind that Wounded Knee, the last major battle of the Indian Wars, had taken place in 1890 and virtually all the Indians were settled on reservations. All this from a film that purports to lecture its audience from time to time on the history of blacks in the American west.
Furthermore, I seriously question that the best vehicle for presenting an important look at blacks in the West is an action film, which is by its very nature a fantasy. Someone in responding to Bernadelli's review said that what westerns are, shoot-'em-ups. To which I again say, piffle. Yes, a lot of westerns are just that, but the best ones are not. They may include scenes of violence, but that is not their main thrust, their purpose, their excuse for existing. And certainly, this film is the merest welter of a lot of other westerns. Van Peebles looks as much as he can like Clint Eastwood. He has also liberally helped himself to scenes from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, UNFORGIVEN, BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, THE WILD BUNCH, ONE-EYED JACKS, and the complete oeuvres of John Ford and Sergio Leone.
And then there are the narrative and style problems. Van Peebles has reduced an important story to a disjointed succession of violent confrontation between a black character, usually Van Peebles, and one of two major psychotic white villains or their many, and mostly, white henchmen. All this filmed with various, irrelevant "effects" such as a brown filter that makes it look like he used film stock that was too old. Complications in technique and a busy sound track of mostly inappropriate music cannot disguise, indeed only emphasize, the unintelligent mess this movie is.
Despite all this, I have to say I found what enjoyment there was in some individual actors' performances. Stephen Baldwin was interesting as the only white member of the posse. Billy Zane obviously was having a lot of fun hamming it up as the psycho colonel. It was fun seeing Melvin Van Peebles, Mario's dad. But none of the actors was able to rise much above the mess of the rest of the film.
I was also interested in snippets of some silent films with black cowboys and other western heroes. I would like to know more about them.
I cannot recommend this film to anyone, but if you must go, be sure you wait for a cheap matinee.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
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