- Also Known As:
- Unknown
- Version:
- Language:
- Length:
- 89 minutes
- Review Format:
- Cinema
- Year:
- 1974
- Country:
- Predominant Genre:
- Comedy
- Director:
- Outstanding Performances:
- Premiss:
- To ruin a White supremacist frontier town (whose land he wants to buy cheaply), a corrupt State Attorney General appoints a Black sheriff, who promptly becomes his most formidable adversary.
- Themes:
- Advertising | Alienation | Christianity | Compassion | Corporate Power | Courage | Curative | Emotional repression | Empathy | Ethnicity | Friendship | Genocide | Guilt | Humanity | Identity | Justice | Loneliness | Loyalty | Materialism | Narcissism | Personal | Political | Preventive | Republicanism | Sadomasochism | Schizophrenia | Sex | Sexual Repression | Social class | Snobbery | Solipsism | Stereotyping | White culture | White supremacy
- Similar to:
Authentic Frontier Gibberish
Clever and astute satire on both Hollywood westerns - the racism obscured by White myth-making accounts of the American West - and White supremacy, that fully explores the White tendency to use others to aggrandize themselves by stereotyping those they wish to exploit.
The film’s open contempt for stupid White people is hopelessly funny in exposing typical White superficiality in their only being able to judge others by their appearance - along with inevitable White inbreeding caused by only breeding with people who look alike (all of the townspeople are surnamed Johnson
). There is also much talk of the White propensity for using psychopathic violence to solve any and all problems.
All the clichés of nearly all the westerns you have ever seen are on show here: Town drunk, cowardly-citizens needing a brave man to protect them, pork ‘n’ beans, racist wagon trains filled with conquistadors pretending to be settlers, the fastest gunslingers in the West - all interspersed with stealing Indian lands, the inevitable hatred of Black people, Sinophobia & the usual White, emotionally-repressed sex-obsession. There are also many digs at unhealthy White attachments to their parents and the way in which Whites deflect attention from their exploitation of poor Whites by blaming the social position of the latter on the presence of Black people.
Anachronistic and avant-garde gags aplenty make it obvious that it is contemporary race-relations which are at stake here - not those of 1874 - which have, in fact, remained unchanged; especially the White fear of Black men having sex with White women - with the joyful consent of the latter.
Cleavon LITTLE (relishing the opportunity to parody the racist tropes of Gone with the Wind) and the rest of the cast are all superb in a film with an eclectic script that covers so many topics it could not possibly fail to amuse at least all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time.
Easily the best movie-spoof ever made, as well as a celebration of basic humanity fighting the good fight against systemic racism, wherein Black people are offered tolerance in lieu of hatred - but only if Blacks are politically-useful to Whites.
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