The rediscovery of black American cinema continues with the rerelease of Sidney Poitier’s directorial debut from 1972: a terrifically enjoyable western adventure bromance, packed with brio and breezy, unreflective energy and tilted to the lighter end of the tonal spectrum. This (along with cultural ghettoisation) has perhaps meant that it hasn’t previously been considered a serious classic. But the time may well come when Buck and the Preacher are spoken of in the same breath as Butch and Sundance.
Sidney Poitier is Buck: a frontiersman who after the civil war makes a living as a wagonmaster for black people from Louisiana who want to head out west and farm the unclaimed territories, dreaming of the promised lands of Kansas and Colorado, with their great soil and climate. His job is to conduct the wagon train and parley with the Native American tribes to allow them peaceful passage. Buck’s tough, capable girlfriend Ruth is played by the formidable Ruby Dee. But the settlers are harassed by a sinister white posse led by Deshay, in tatty Confederate garb, played by exploitation veteran Cameron Mitchell. Deshay’s men are theoretically “labour recruiters” from Louisiana, here to persuade the pioneers to abandon their plans and return home to pick cotton. In fact, he is running a psychopathic hate campaign, intending merely to murder and rob the settlers, confident of never being caught and (perhaps) intending to publicise his victims’ unpunished fate as a deterrent to those black people back in Louisiana also thinking of leaving.
Buck is Deshay’s sworn enemy, but he also finds himself in conflict with a notorious itinerant opportunist and thief, carrying a Bible and spouting scripture, nicknamed “Preacher”, a slippery grinning individual who may want to sell out Buck to the white posse for money. He is played with tremendous gusto by Poitier’s famous contemporary and rival, Harry Belafonte. Buck and the Preacher at first cordially detest each other, but then make common cause against the bad guys – and maybe the Preacher’s religious faith isn’t as phoney as all that.
Poitier fired the white director he initially hired, Joseph Sargent (of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three fame), for his perceived lack of interest in the material. But Buck and the Preacher in fact has a white writer: Ernest Kinoy, who had written Poitier’s earlier film Brother John (and went on to write episodes of TV’s Roots as well as Gordon Parks’ Leadbelly biopic). The forthright, punchy screenplay shows Kinoy’s TV background, but there is a galloping energy to the whole drama, especially when Buck and the Preacher plan to rob a bank to recover the money that Deshay’s men stole from the settlers – Ohio banknotes which we see being paid into the bank by the local bordello mistress, gloating at her 3% interest.
Probably the film’s most heartfelt moment comes when Buck has to negotiate with the Native Americans and persuade them that they are “brothers”, both oppressed by the white people, even though the tribes remember Buck in army uniform, enforcing the white man’s law. These characters, it has to be said, are not played by Indigenous people: Julie Robinson (Belafonte’s wife) played tribeswoman Sinsie and Mexican-American actor Enrique Lucero played the chief. But there is a fervency and conviction in these scenes and a tremendous chemistry between these two heavyweights, Poitier and Belafonte.
• Buck and the Preacher is released on 3 March in UK cinemas.
