Jonathan Majors Flies High In J.D. Dillard's 'Devotion' (TIFF Review)

The heroes of the Korean War, America’s forgotten war, specifically Jesse Brown, who became the first Black aviator in Navy history, have been largely erased from history.

However, Sleight director J.D. Dillard, whose father is the second African American Blue Angels pilot, has always known Brown’s story, which is the subject of Devotion.

Adapted from Adam Makos' book of the same name, 'Devotion' opens in 1950.

We meet a strapping Brown (the always immaculate Jonathan Majors), who has endured every type of abuse and anguish to earn his place as a Navy fighter pilot. Dillard chooses to begin his story once Jesse is already established. Though the audience may not be privy to the navel and aviator lingo that take up much of the film’s beginning, Major is electric on the screen. His world further expands when we enter his quaint Rhode Island home, where his wife Daisy (a magnificent Christina Jackson) is buzzing about with their young daughter, Pam.

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‘The Harder They Fall’: Inside the Very Real History of Jeymes Samuel’s All-Black Western

Before the opening credits of Jeymes Samuel’s “The Harder They Fall” splash across the screen, outlaw Rufus Buck (Idris Elba) has already murdered two people,  irrevocably changing a young boy’s life and setting the stage for an epic-scale shoot-em-up in the process. Set in the Old West, the Netflix feature has all the bells and whistles of a traditional Hollywood Western, but Samuel’s debut feature isn’t just a new spin on classics of the genre like “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” or “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.” This narrative is grounded in actual history.

Samuel’s world is populated by characters named after real-life Black figures who lived (and sometimes caused chaos) in the Old West. For Samuel and his star Jonathan Majors, who plays the revenge-minded Nat Love, it was about unearthing the true history of the American West and getting into the hearts and minds of lives lived and lost without the narrative of slavery or oppression. Just as essential: finding a way of turning that history, one rarely explored on the big screen, into a brand-new cinematic adventure.

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New Netflix Western 'The Harder They Fall' was long overdue

In the golden age of Hollywood, Westerns dominated the box office. From the 1930s to the 1960s, some of the biggest films in cinema were from the genre. Jeymes Samuel puts his own stamp on the Western in his directorial debut for Netflix, out in theaters Friday. With intense action sequences, violence and a love story at the center, “The Harder They Fall” has all the components that make the genre so iconic. However, it also offers something that many past Westerns have lacked — the truth. 

According to Smithsonian magazine, 1 in 4 cowboys in the 18th and 19th centuries were Black. But looking at iconic films like “Dances With Wolves,” “High Noon” and “Rio Bravo,” it would seem that Black people don’t even exist. “The Harder They Fall,” however, positions Black people in the center of its narrative. 

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