The filmmaker’s beloved directorial debut restructured the Western genre through his quintessentially original lens, and lives on as one of the pioneering examples of black heroism in American film.
By the time Sidney Poitier got around to directing his debut feature Buck and the Preacher, he was already one of the top five or six most important people in American cinema. A trailblazer in film if there ever was one, the Bahamian-American actor’s starring roles in features like The Defiant Ones (1958), A Raisin in the Sun (1961), In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) had made him the first African-American movie star. Vanity Fair called him “the Martin Luther King Jr. of the movies” for the positive impact his characters would have on the image of the black man on screen, with his depiction of the black experience being divorced from stereotype and relying little on white audiences’ pre-conceptions on how a black person should look, talk, or act in the movies. The pictures he starred in confronted race relations head on, and still, Poitier was constantly crowned king of the US box office. An instantly groundbreaking scene in In the Heat of the Night sees plantation owner Eric Endicott slap Poitier’s Detective Virgil Tibbs across the face, who retaliates by palming him right back, to Endicott’s horror. This show of black defiance and authority wasn’t in the original source material, and was insisted upon during filming by Poitier. “I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll make this movie for you if you give me your absolute guarantee when he slaps me I slap him right back and that it will play in every version of this movie.” He said: “I try not to do things that are against nature.” It was the slap heard around the world, and it was met with cheers by black audiences and gasps by whites (as confirmed by Poitier himself, who claimed he could judge the ratio of people at any given screening of the film by this metric). In the Heat of the Night went on to storm the Academy Awards, taking home Best Picture and four other awards (though the fact that Poitier wasn’t nominated for Best Actor is telling), and topped it off by making 12 times its budget in box office revenue for good measure.
Poitier had built a legacy fit for a lifetime and then some, but he still had mountains to conquer, and while the 1972 Western Buck and the Preacher isn’t the first film to be directed by an African-American (that accolade belongs to Oscar Micheaux with the silent film The Homesteader (1919) and later Gordon Parks, who directed the first studio-led feature by an African-American, 1969’s The Learning Tree), such occurrences were few and far between, and the film marks an important moment of black revisionism in American cinema.
The setting for such an occasion: Kansas territory, circa 1870. The American Civil War has just ended and the dust is beginning to settle on a new American frontier. Buck (Poitier), a former soldier, leads wagons of newly freed African- Americans from Louisiana to Kansas, where they hope to start new lives in the unsettled territories there. The Louisiana plantation owners, fearing the end of their livelihoods brought on by the abolishment of slavery, hire a group of roguish white bounty hunters to raid African-American settlements and scare black communities back to the Louisiana cotton fields. In comes Harry Belafonte, the other most bankable African- American actor in Hollywood and the second co-producer of the movie (with Belafonte productions), as the titular Preacher, a seedy but charismatic reverend who has a chip on his shoulder after Buck steals his horse. But when the bounty hunters set their sights on Buck’s community, the two rivals agree to put their feud to rest and become unlikely partners in order to ensure their wagon reaches the Kansas promised land.
It wasn’t by design that Poitier would direct Buck and the Preacher, but more a responsibility that he bore on himself. Originally, Joseph Sargent (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, White Lightning) was hired to direct, but Poitier, whose production company E & R Production Corps co-produced the movie, fired him a few days into production. He said that Sargent didn’t have the creative vision that the film needed for “black people and minorities in general to find in Buck and the Preacher a certain substance, a certain nourishment, a certain complement of the self.” As such, Poitier took the reins and shot the film in just over a month.
Much like Poitier’s career up until then, the production of Buck and the Preacher was riddled with careful consideration for how all audiences would perceive it. Poitier was outspoken in his support of the Civil Rights movement, and his activist sensibility had now found its way into the Wild West. How many Westerns of the day could you point to with a majority black cast? How many that show the Native Americans in a sympathetic—scratch that, heroic—light? Solidarity is at the heart of Buck and the Preacher. In the film, Buck negotiates respectfully with the Native Americans for his and his tribe’s safe passage through their territory. They are presented as firm, but fair, and ultimately honourable. The movie ends by doubling down on this idea, with the Native Americans coming to our protagonist’s rescue against the bloodthirsty white raiders on their heels.
As far as Poitier was concerned, he had kicked down the golden gates of Hollywood, and now that he was inside, he felt obligated to correct a screen history that had long been whitewashed by the industry. “We thought that black people played an important part in the building of the West—we wanted black children to see that,” Poitier said, in an interview with Ellis Haizlip of Soul! TV. This extends beyond just the images you see in the film. The soundtrack for the film also supports Poitier’s revisionist ethos, giving the traditional twang of the Western a jazzy edge that finds its roots in the blues, with compositions by jazz legend Benny Carter and a magnificent line-up of Black musicians, from Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry to Don Frank Brooks. Buck and the Preacher may not stand up with the cinematic brilliance of Ford’s The Searchers or Leone’s Dollars Trilogy, but it restructured the Western genre through Poitier’s quintessentially original lens, and lives on as one of the pioneering examples of black heroism in American film. It was Sidney Poitier at the height of his powers, a Golden Age titan with one eye on Hollywood’s past, and another mapping out a blueprint for its future.
