USA,
1993, 105 min
Shown in 1993
CREDITS
- dir
-
Mario Van Peebles
- prod
-
Preston Holmes, Jim Steele
- scr
-
Sy Richardson, Dario Scardapane
- cam
-
Peter Menzies
- editor
-
Mark Conte
- mus
-
Michel Colombier
- cast
-
Mario Van Peebles, Stephen Baldwin, Charles Lane, Tiny Lister Jr.
- prod co
-
Polygram Filmed Entertainment; Gramercy Pictures
- source
-
Gramercy Pictures
-
COMMENTS
Mario Van Peebles and Melvin Van Peebles in person.
OTHER
Mario Van Peebles’ second feature, following New Jack City, is a colorful and vastly entertaining revisionist Western. What is revised is the idea that the West Was White. The young multi-talented Van Peebles stars as Jessie Lee, a “buffalo soldier” in the Spanish-American War, who deserts the Cuban battlefield with a “posse” of fellow fugitives victimized by a corrupt racist commander. Most of Jessie’s gang of outlaws are Black, and they blaze their way across the multicultural West of 1897, bent on reaching his hometown of Freemanville, a utopian community founded after the Civil War by runaway slaves, where an old score needs to be settled. The film is bracketed by contemporary scenes centered on the icon-like presence of the great Woody Strode. Others in the cast include Big Daddy Kane, Billy Zane, Pam Grier, Tone Loc, Richard Jordan and Melvin Van Peebles, Mario’s pioneering filmmaker father whose first feature, Story of a Three-Day Pass, was enjoyed by SFIFF audiences in 1966. An ambitious film, Posse operates on several levels: straight action, fable and history lesson—and succeeds boldly. Van Peebles does not avoid the violence that existed in the old West, but stylizes the action through camera choreography and italicizes it with self-referential humor, so that, as with Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns and so many classic samurai films, the end result approaches art house fare.
—Tom Luddy
FACTOID #81
Anjelica Huston was the first recipient of the Piper-Heidsieck Award in 1991. When Huston received the prize from the champagne maker, she joked, “Can I drink it?”
