Donkey lable hell rider7/11/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ( The Bronze Buckaroo director Richard C. Musser and Stewart’s texts outline a brief history of the ‘race movie’ – a designation referring to films intended principally for the consumption of segregated African-American audiences, produced by black or mixed casts and crews. The set, funded by a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign, is comprised of five Blu-ray discs and a hefty booklet offering contextualizing essays by Charles Musser and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart – co-curators of the collection along with celebrity executive producer DJ Spooky, who contributes some mute button-worthy original scores to silent films. Spencer Williams, The Blood of Jesus, 1941. You can find it alongside other such curios, rare documentary snapshots and works of dogged, determined artistry compiled in Pioneers of African-American Cinema, a new box set released this summer by distributors Kino Lorber, produced in collaboration with the Library of Congress. This racial shift doesn’t transform The Bronze Buckaroo into a masterpiece, but it sure as hell makes it a singular object. One important element, however, distinguishes The Bronze Buckaroo from run-of-the-mill Republic Pictures quickies: the entire cast is African-American – from debonair, light-skinned lead Herb Jeffries to stout, surly Spencer Williams, here playing the rancher’s hired muscle – and its ‘Arizona’ was a black-owned dude ranch in Riverside County, California. ![]() It pits a straight-shooting range rider against a scheming rancher, and its hour-long running time is generously padded with musical numbers and comic relief, involving ventriloquism and a talking donkey. Released in 1939, the year of John Ford’s Stagecoach and the renaissance of the western, The Bronze Buckaroo is, in almost every respect, a typical low-budget singing cowboy picture of the type that proliferated in the years of the Great Depression. ![]()
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