The film “Thomasine & Bushrod,” from 1974, is a blaxploitation Western—a hidden classic of the genre as well as a film of modernist originality.
The term “blaxploitation” has always sat uneasily with me because there’s nothing exploitative about many of the movies that made the term an honorific. Often, these exemplary works are simply genre films from the nineteen-seventies, made by Black directors and featuring Black protagonists and actors. They featured outlaw-heroes like those of white Hollywood, who were all the freer to make mischief in the post-Hays Code, post-“” age of the late nineteen-sixties and beyond.
The landscape that the pair negotiate, separately and together, is a horror maze of racist violence, insults, and attitudes—and of misogynous menace. Bushrod finds the bodies of two Black men hanging outside a town, lynched as an explicitly posted warning to other Black people to stay out. Thomasine, delivering an outlaw to a marshal, is taunted both racially and sexually even as she enforces the law.
Curiously, Thomasine is something of a media person—and her alertness to public images is a key aspect of the movie’s modernism. As a bounty hunter, she combs newspapers for leads and studies the official advertising of “Wanted” posters, with their photos and lurid descriptions. When she finds that she and Bushrod, too, are wanted, she takes control of their published image by way of a small-town photography studio.
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