I was pretty excited when I saw that the Criterion Channel would be streaming Buffalo Soldiers (1997) as part of their Black Westerns series. I can remember when this movie came out on video. I was a big fan of westerns when I was young, a big fan of Danny Glover, and I ate up Ted Turner’s historical television dramas with an unparalleled relish. This doesn’t really speak to the actual cinematographic merits of Buffalo Soldiers, but rather to the context and circumstance of its release. Honestly, Buffalo Soldiers is a rather mediocre production.
Aesthetic mediocrity aside, what matters in the case of Buffalo Soldiers is the fact that a “lost chapter” of American history is being treated seriously. Films about Black History have always been few and far between in Hollywood, so Buffalo Soldiers is a welcome addition to the pantheon of revisionist westerns. The film addresses issues of identity as Black soldiers navigate life in the army after the Civil War competently. Buffalo Soldiers may rely on some familiar tropes and archetypes, but Danny Glover and his cast mates elevate the material with some fine performances.
What’s problematic in Buffalo Soldiers is the depiction of the Apache people. After Dances With Wolves (1990) Hollywood dispensed with the “brutal savage” type and adopted the “magical earth spirit” type in its place. The latter is certainly less actively destructive to the identity of Native persons than the former, but it still relegates an entire race of people to being “the other”. Walter Hill’s underrated Geronimo: An American Legend (1993) is exceptional in how it avoids either archetype and embraces Native people as human beings. Buffalo Soldiers, like most Hollywood films, can’t help but continue the myth of the “other” even though it’s a film about the struggle for racial equality.
Those familiar with Turner’s television films, like The Rough Riders (1997), know all too well how overly bloated and long these films can be. So it is peculiar that Buffalo Soldiers, clocking in at a hundred minutes, would have actually benefited from a slightly longer running time. What Buffalo Soldiers needs more than anything is more scenes between the Buffalo soldiers and the Apache warriors they have been sent to capture.
