Buck And The Preacher

The early '70s was the time of blaxploitation films, which were usual crime films set in cities. But there were also some black Westerns, which addressed some of the same issues. One of them was Buck And The Preacher, which was also Sidney Poitier's directorial debut.

The film is pretty standard in terms of Western tropes, except it had a black cast, and portrayed white men as villains (Indians were also featured, and also as decent). There had been some Westerns sympathetic to Indians before, but to blacks as well, that was something new.

Poitier also starred as Buck, a wagonmaster for black folks leaving the South after the Civil War. Though they were technically free, they were still working cotton fields as sharecroppers, without any civil rights. Some dared to go West to live free, but brigands hired by the cotton farmers discouraged them, mainly by destroying their camps and shooting dead anyone who interfered.

Into the mix came the Preacher (Harry Belafonte), who is really a con man who keeps a gun in his Bible. Initially he and Poitier are at odds--Poitier steals Belafonte's horse--and Belafonte is offered five-hundred dollars bounty for Poitier by Cameron Mitchell, head white meanie. But when he sees what is being done to the black pioneers, he quickly changes his tune and throws in with Poitier and his wife, Ruby Dee.

As a Western, it is basic stuff, with several shootouts and a bank robbery. But of course it's the subtext that makes it interesting. This film was released in 1972, and the Civil Rights era still lingered. The film makes it clear that just existing as a black person in those days was fraught with peril, and not much had changed by the 1960s. In some ways, it's still alive today, as so many people are arrested while being black. (I just saw footage of a doctor arrested outside his home preparing to help test the homeless for COVID-19. The officer was white, and he arrested the doctor for littering).