Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, Cameron Mitchell
Like Westerns? Good, Buck and the Preacher (1972) is an excellent one. Don’t like Westerns? Good, Buck and the Preacher overturns more than enough about the genre if you’re no cowpoke. Pulling two of the twentieth century’s greatest black entertainers together to play wonderfully against type, this is the rare film that makes excellent entertainment from complex social issues.
Sidney Poitier is the ‘wagon master’ who ferries freed slaves to unsettled territory in the West. Harry Belafonte – in unexpectedly scabrous territory, down to truly stomach-churning dentures – is a vagabond sham-preacher, willing to sell out his kin to make a buck from the white colonists who want to keep black settlers from ‘their land’. How the two team up is more than a buddy comedy meet-cute; it’s a journey of meeting in the middle of the moral compass.
Although recognised as an actor for his acute selection of socially relevant material and his gravitas, Sidney Poitier’s direction of films like Buck and the Preacher has yet to be heralded. It’s a mark of Poitier’s thoughtfulness that he extends the narrative beyond a simplistic racial antagonism to include Indigenous struggles in the Old West.
Courtesy of Park Circus. Restored in 4K in 2022 by Sony Pictures Entertainment at Cineric laboratory, from the original negative. Colour grading completed by MTI.
