As the ‘70s dawned, Sidney Poitier saw his star power begin to fade. As the only Black leading man in Hollywood during the 1960s, Poitier found himself in an unenviable position. Despite starring in envelope-pushing fare such as Raisin in the Sun (1961) and In the Heat of the Night (1967) and winning an Oscar for Best Actor (Lilies of the Field), Poitier still didn’t have the same access to roles as his white counterparts did. Poitier typically played parts that served as “credit to his race.” His characters existed to teach his white co-stars lessons about Blackness. Poitier didn’t play characters with sexual desire or anger that wasn’t righteous. Even in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Stanley Kramer’s 1967 comedy that finds Poitier in an interracial relationship, he plays an inoffensive, whitewashed doctor.
Poitier’s Black peers didn’t celebrate his achievements the same way his white co-stars and audience did. His friend Harry Belafonte frequently criticized Poitier for eschewing politics and Black audiences disliked how Poitier took on inoffensive roles that lacked teeth. Even his much-beloved role in To Sir, With Love (1967) feels submissive to the white characters in the movie. Perhaps these were the only roles offered to Poitier, but he also claimed that he wouldn’t play a villainous role since Black actors carried a legacy of playing the bad guy.
By 1972, Poitier no longer had the golden touch. He had appeared in a series of poorly received films, including a sequel to In the Heat of the Night that audiences met with indifference. The tide had shifted in Hollywood and new, more personal films were de rigueur, the type of character-driven movies that Poitier helped usher in with the implosion of the Hays Code in 1968. Then, a serendipitous opportunity presented itself. Production had begun on Buck and the Preacher, a Western starring and produced by Poitier and Belafonte about a wagon master and a crooked preacher who join up to fight off white bounty hunters determined to stop a wagon train of Black pioneers from heading west. Director Joseph Sargent wasn’t working out, so Poitier and Belafonte fired him. Poitier stepped in as interim director but was never replaced. Though a few other Black men had helmed films prior, Buck and the Preacher would be the first western to feature Black characters since the ‘40s. But rather than feature Stepin Fetchit buffoonery, Poitier and Belafonte wanted to reclaim the western, giving voice to the Black men, women and children who crossed the country in search of a better life, or died trying.
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In the film, Poitier plays Buck, a trail guide who helps Black wagon trains through treacherous land. Though the stoic Buck isn’t very different from Poitier’s earlier roles, he doesn’t have a problem fighting back when pushed. Many believe that the scene where Poitier smacks an insolent white man across the face in In the Heat of the Night is a turning point for Black characters in cinema.
However, Buck guns down multiple white men in Buck and the Preacher, refusing to turn the other cheek and getting revenge for the multiple Black characters killed in the film. It’s not quite Shaft and not quite Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song but it’s pretty risqué for the mild-mannered Poitier.
Buck and the Preacher is set in the years following the Civil War. There is a diaspora of Black Americans, betrayed by a promise of 40 acres and a mule that never came to fruition. So, like other Americans, these former slaves look west as a place of opportunity. However, plantation owners have hired mercenaries to hector these starry-eyed travelers. Using threats and violence, these former Confederate soldiers terrorize the film’s Black characters, hoping to frighten them into returning to the plantations in the South to pick cotton once again.
There are multiple layers of racial politics at work here. Near the beginning of the film, Buck must negotiate with a tribe of Native Americans to allow for safe passage through their land. Even though the Native Americans have also been persecuted by white settlers, they aren’t interested in uniting with the Black pioneers to face a common enemy. Instead, they remember the Buffalo soldiers, or the Black cavalry soldiers who helped protect American interests as we expanded westward. They are willing to help, but only for a fee.
After numerous pogroms by white mercenaries, Buck and the Preacher decided to fight back. A tonal shift at the film’s midpoint, turns Buck and the Preacher into a heist movie of sorts and soon we find our protagonists, along with Buck’s wife Ruth (Ruby Dee) on the run from an angry horde of white men.
Buck and the Preacher exists at an interesting point in Poitier’s career. It’s a revisionist western that could have never been made in the ‘60s. But it doesn’t go as far as some of its contemporaries, especially the blaxploitation films of the era. If anything, Belafonte’s freewheeling preacher feels more like a contemporary Black hero, a la John Shaft, than Poitier’s more staid Buck. But for an actor at the end of his golden period, Buck and the Preacher not only gives the Black pioneer a second life but Poitier too, but this time in the director’s chair.
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