Blu-ray Review: Sidney Poitier’s Buck and the Preacher on the Criterion Collection

By 1972, Sidney Poitier had long been lauded by critics and audiences alike, winning the best actor Oscar in 1964 and going on to become a bona fide movie star. But as he shot up the Hollywood ranks, the liberal tide of the ’60s was still being felt, and Poitier was notoriously criticized by large swaths of the Black community. Unfairly or not, many found his characters, embodiments of Black excellence, to often be deferential to racist white characters and non-threatening to white audiences.

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.