Directed by:
Sidney PoitierScreenplay:
Ernest KinoyCinematography:
Álex Phillips Jr.Composer:
Benny CarterCast:
Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, Cameron Mitchell, Denny Miller, Nita Talbot, James McEachin, Clarence Muse, John Howard, John Dierkes (more)VOD (2)
Plots(1)
With his rousingly entertaining directorial debut, Sidney Poitier helped rewrite the history of the western, bringing Black heroes to a genre in which they had always been sorely underrepresented. Combining boisterous buddy comedy with blistering, Black Power–era political fury, Poitier and a marvelously mischievous Harry Belafonte star as a tough and taciturn wagon master and an unscrupulous, pistol-packing “preacher,” who join forces in order to take on the white bounty hunters threatening a westward-bound caravan of recently freed enslaved people. A superbly crafted revisionist landmark, Buck and the Preacher subverts Hollywood conventions at every turn and reclaims the western genre in the name of Black liberation. (Criterion)
(more)Reviews (2)
An increasingly mediocre film, and without kidding, it seemed to me that it lasted more than two hours... And yet it starts off so well and then it is good for quite a long time. In my opinion, the biggest stumbling block lies in the elimination of the main villain, which comes unexpectedly soon and after which only an uninteresting anonymous bunch of whites are chasing the protagonists. The final shootout corrects the impression a little, but only a little. But if something is great from beginning to end, it is definitely the music.
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This is Western that plays it fairly safe, but also tries to highlight racial issues, not just between whites and Indians and whites and blacks, but also between blacks and Indians. People are just intolerant in general. Sidney Poitier showed that he can play his cowboy well, but he also did a good job in handling the direction of the film.
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