Define why the bounty hunters were looking for buck in the movie buck and the preacher.

In 1972, Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte sat down for an interview with Ellis Haizlip, the host of the TV variety series Soul! They were there to promote their new film, Buck and the Preacher, a western depicting Black cowboy heroes and countering decades of Hollywood’s whitewashed version of history. It was their first feature collaboration, after years of being close friends and fellow activists in the civil rights movement, and it marked Poitier’s directorial debut. Haizlip asked them an age-old question that comes with the territory of having achieved a certain level of fame and/or monetary success, especially if you’re Black: Did they find it difficult relating to those who knew them before the stardom, awards, and cultural influence?

It was a challenge at times, Poitier admitted, largely because structural barriers permitted only a few Black people to attain their level of success. Belafonte added: “We have used our power, we have used our craft, in order to set platforms for other artists to be able to project themselves, other Black artists. So that despite the inequities, despite the contradictions, within this society, it has not deterred us from a Black consciousness.”

In other words: Sidney and I have come a long way, but we have not forgotten where we come from.

With Buck and the Preacher, which became Poitier’s directorial debut after he fired Joseph Sargent a few days into the production, the actor-director would, consciously or not, push back against his public image as an artist who wasn’t looking to ruffle too many feathers. While Buck, an experienced trail guide leading a group of newly freed slaves out West, is as stoic and noble as many of the characters that Poitier played over the previous two decades, he often uses his intelligence as a means of deliberately deceiving or undermining white characters, and never hesitates to use violence against them when push comes to shove.

The film finds the freed slaves trying to evade white mercenaries who’ve been hired by plantation owners to scare them back into indentured servitude back in Louisiana. In these early post-Civil War years, the promise of 40 acres and a mule to freed slaves and their families had already been broken, leaving extremely vulnerable Black men, women, and children with no choice but to cross unfamiliar and extremely perilous terrain to rebuild their lives. And in the case of the freed slaves depicted in Buck and the Preacher, they’re forced to negotiate with Native Americans, a group all too familiar with white oppression. But rather than solely define these groups of people by their righteous anger and portray them as being instantly willing to unite and fight together against a common enemy, Buck and the Preacher deftly captures the deep mistrust that actually existed between them throughout the Reconstruction Era.

The chief, played by Enrique Lucero in the film, is aware that Poitier’s Buck fought with the Union against Native Americans just a few years earlier. And even knowing that Buck is escorting former slaves, who were as exploited and brutalized as many from the chief’s tribe, he still charges Buck for safe passage through his people’s tribal land and repeatedly reminds him that they will not fight on his behalf if the white men catch up with him.

Buck and the Preacher deftly homes in on the shared grief of Native and Black Americans, while also slyly inferring that their hesitancy to trust one another ironically stems from having suffered at the hands of white supremacists. Buck’s wife, Ruth (Ruby Dee), asserts that the malice of Southern white violence directed at Blacks is “like a poison, soaked into ground.” The sins are so egregious that they can’t be atoned for and their reverberations are inescapable no matter how quickly the freed slaves push toward the edge of the frontier.

For all of Buck and the Preacher’s serious attempts to function as a revisionist western by centering Blacks in the narrative and examining the critical role they played on the frontier, it’s also a wildly entertaining film. Benny Carter’s wonderful score, with its eclectic blend of bass, harmonica, and a twangy mouth-harp, feels like it’s straight out of a blaxploitation film. And Harry Belafonte’s con-man preacher, who packs a gun in his bible and, at one point, shucks and jives for a room full of white men in order to distract them ahead of blowing them away, certainly recalls many a down-and-dirty blaxploitation hero. Belafonte thrives in the role of jokester, and the odd-couple banter between him and Poitier shows the latter could just as easily filled in as the straight man in any comedy of the era.

Image/Sound

Criterion’s transfer, from a new 4K restoration, boasts a bright, crisp image with lots of detail, both in the wide tracking shots of horse-bound chases and in close-ups, which reveal every contour of the actors’ faces, and in Preacher’s case, every speck of tartar on his rotting teeth. The even grain distribution gives the transfer a slightly soft, film-like texture, while the high dynamic range features very naturalistic colors. The mono audio is surprisingly robust, with a strong separation of elements in the most cacophonous shootout scenes and richness to Benny Carter’s fun and funky bass-and-harmonica-driven score.

Extras

Mia Mask, author of Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western, gives an incredibly insightful interview that briefly traces Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte’s careers, their complicated relationship to Black audiences, and how they approached their art and civil rights activism. She also touches on the history of Black Americans in the West and in Hollywood westerns. In her interview, Belafonte’s daughter, Gina, further expounds on her father’s work as an activist, while a behind-the-scenes featurette finds Harry extolling the virtues of working with a Black director on a film about the Black experience. The disc also comes episodes of The Dick Cavett Show and Soul! on which Poitier and Belafonte discuss, among other things, the Black flight from the South after the Civil War and their hopes to present a film that serves as an historical corrective while also entertaining audiences. Finally, a foldout booklet includes an essay by critic Aisha Harris, who astutely addresses how both Poitier and Belafonte traversed the thorny terrain of entertaining white audiences while attempting to remain true to the communities from which they came.

Overall

Sidney Poitier’s directorial debut is a fierce and funny portrait of the Black experience in the American West, and Criterion’s edition will hopefully bring it the attention it deserves.

Score: 

Cast: Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, Cameron Mitchell, Denny Miller, Enrique Lucero, Julie Robinson Belafonte, Clarence Muse, Lynn Hamilton  Director: Sidney Poitier  Screenwriter: Ernest Kinoy  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 103 min  Rating: GP  Year: 1973  Release Date: August 23, 2022  Buy: Video

Why is Buck and the Preacher important to Sidney Poitier?

How did Buck and the Preacher end?

Who played the preacher in Buck and the Preacher?

Is Buck and the Preacher a good movie?