BLACK RODEO
A HISTORY OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN WESTERN

Buck and the Preacher

USA 1972, 102 mins
Director: Sidney Poitier


Among the more successful elements of Jordan Peele’s flawed, ambitious space-cowboy foray Nope (2022) is the film’s intelligent engagement with cinema history and visual culture. A particularly significant reference is to Sidney Poitier’s 1972 film Buck and the Preacher, the poster of which is seen displayed in the home of horse-wrangler protagonists OJ and Em Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer), as Peele places his film in the context of Black western forebears.

Rooted in 1970s western revisionism and burgeoning Blaxploitation, Buck casts Poitier alongside Harry Belafonte as cowboys in the late 1860s who end up uniting to lead a wagon train of Black settlers from Louisiana to Kansas, all the while trying to outwit the white raiders hired to either intimidate the travellers back to the plantations of the South, or murder them. With echoes of John Ford’s Wagon Master (1950) and numerous westerns focused on the bonding of contrasting male characters (Poitier’s wagonmaster Buck is a wily former soldier; Belafonte’s ‘Preacher’ is really a hustler), Buck and the Preacher is highly allusive. But to view the film merely as a Black Butch and Sundance is to diminish it: Poitier’s film goes deeper, supplementing shoot-outs, chases and comic high jinks with more serious intent, evident in its credit sequence and title-card preamble. This opening, with sepia-toned images of African American pioneers, not only lays out the film’s post-Civil War context from a Black perspective but also announces its intention to challenge historical erasure: ‘This picture is dedicated to those men, women, and children who lie in graves as unmarked as their place in history.’

A subversive streak is evident in numerous aspects, from the film’s nuanced depiction of the relations between African-American and Native American characters to the space given to the character of Buck’s wife Ruth (invested with strength and complexity by the vital Ruby Dee). Poitier’s own performance is compelling, but the film’s wild card is Belafonte’s turn as the wisecracking Preacher, who packs a pistol between the pages of his Good Book.

Introduced during some enthusiastic al fresco ablutions, Belafonte’s pleasure in roughing up his image and persona – yellowed teeth, wild eyes – is palpable; he also has the film’s strongest character arc. Despite some heavy-handed elements (Benny Carter’s score, performed by bluesmen Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee and Don Frank Brooks, is over-insistently employed in the film’s opening stages), Poitier – replacing Joseph Sargent as director – shows great assurance for a first-time filmmaker in modulating shifts from action and comedy to more reflective, emotional moments, bringing out the strengths of Ernest Kinoy’s screenplay. Poitier’s career as a director would encompass both worthy efforts (the 1973 romance A Warm December) and woeful ones (the 1990 Bill Cosby comedy Ghost Dad); this film, undervalued on release, remains a highlight, and richly rewards rediscovery.
Alex Ramon, Sight and Sound, November 2022

Buck and the Preacher, which marked Sidney Poitier’s directorial debut, focuses on a hitherto neglected part of (Black) American history: the post-Civil War period when freed slaves moved west to found homesteads, but were tracked down by white marauders hired to stop the exodus of cheap Black labour from the South. Poitier also stars in the film, as the devoted ex-Union cavalryman who becomes wagon-master to a group of Black migrants.

Structurally, Buck and the Preacher is a fairly conventional western, employing many of the set-pieces found in the genre. However, it re-interprets elements of the genre in Black terms, reversing many of the conventions (or expectations) in order to articulate a specifically Black perspective. At times this places a lot of strain on the generic conventions, particularly in view of the western’s roots in white supremacy. Consequently, the positive relationship between the Blacks and the Indians (as opposed to the negative one between the whites and Blacks on the one hand, and the whites and Indians on the other) can only be sustained by strident civil rights polemic.

The militancy of the 1970s is nevertheless clearly evident, although the film avoids the more extreme, controversial imagery of the ‘blaxploitation’ cycle of films made during the period. The image of freed slaves seeking a new life elsewhere not only has a contemporary significance, but also provides a constant reminder of the Southern plantation from which the migrants are escaping. By implication, it is not the big white mansion and cosy white aristocracy that they want to leave behind, but brutal slavery. Thus, within the film’s framework, it is wholly unnecessary to engage in polemics around the Southern milieu as such.

Not surprisingly, Buck and the Preacher was well-received by both white and Black audiences, and widely acclaimed as a serious historical film depicting the Black American experience positively.
Jim Pines, NFT programme notes

BUCK AND THE PREACHER
Director: Sidney Poitier
©: Columbia Pictures Industries Inc.
Production Companies: E. & R. Productions Corporation, Belafonte Enterprises
Producer: Joel Glickman
Associate Producer: Herb Wallerstein
Unit Production Manager: Sheldon Schrager
Production Consultant: Alfonso Sánchez Tello
Location Contact: José Haro
2nd Unit Director: Chuck Hayward
Assistant Directors: Sheldon Schrager, Jesús Marín
Script Supervisor: Malcolm Atterbury Jr
Casting: Billy Gordon
Screenplay: Ernest Kinoy
Story: Ernest Kinoy, Drake Walker
Director of Photography: Alex Phillips
Camera Operator: Manuel Santaella
Key Grip: Rafael Delong
Crane Grip: Salvador Serrano
Special Photography: Gilbert-Waugh Productions
Special Effects: Léon Ortega
Film Editor: Pembroke J. Herring
Assistant Editor: Garner M.J. Morris
Apprentice Editor: Jason Starks
Production Designer: Sydney Z. Litwack
Set Decorator: Ernesto Carrasco
Prop Master: Antonio Mata
Costume Designer: Guy Verhille
Wardrobe: Adolfo Ramírez, Ermon Sessions
Hairdresser: Harold Melvin
Titles: Maury Nemoy
Music: Benny Carter
Featuring: Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee
Music Editor: Else Blangsted
Sound Mixer: Tom Overton
Dubbing Mixer: Richard Portman
Sound Effects: Ltd. Edit International
Dialogue Coach: Alice Spivak
Wrangler: Jose Maria Hernandez

Cast
Sidney Poitier (Buck)
Harry Belafonte (Preacher)
Ruby Dee (Ruth)
Cameron Mitchell (Deshay)
Denny Miller (Floyd)
Nita Talbot (Madam Esther)
James Mceachin (Kingston)
Clarence Muse (Cudjo)
Enrique Lucero (indian chief)
Julie Robinson (Sinsie)
John Kelly (sheriff)
Lynn Hamilton (Sarah)
Tony Brubaker (headman)
Bobby Johnson (man who is shot)
Doug Johnson (Sam)
Errol John (Joshua)
Ken Menard (Little Henry)
Pamela Jones (Delilah)
Drake Walker (elder)
Dennis Hines (Little Toby)
Fred M. Waugh (Mizoo)
Bill Shannon (Tom)
Phil Adams (Frank)
Walter Scott (Earl)
John Howard (George)
Shirleena Manchur (Esther’s girl)
La Markova (Esther’s girl)
Hannelore Richter (Esther’s girl)
Valerie Heckman (Esther’s girl)
Stephanie Lower (Esther’s girl)
José Carlos Ruiz (brave)
Ron Fletcher (Logan)
Jerry Gatlin (deputy)
Ivan Scott (express agent)
Bill Cook (man in express office)
John Kennedy (bank teller)

USA 1972
102 mins
Digital 4K

Restored in 4K in 2022 by Sony Pictures Entertainment at Cineric laboratory, from the original negative. Colour grading completed by MTI

Please note that many of these films contain excessive violence along with racist, misogynist and other discriminatory language, images or other content that reflect views prevalent in its time but will cause offence today (as they did then). The titles are included here for historical, cultural or aesthetic reasons and these views are in no way endorsed by the BFI or its partners.

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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
Questions/comments? Contact the Programme Notes team by email