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In 1972, Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte sat down for an interview with Ellis Haizlip, the host of the TV variety series Soul! They were there to promote their new film, Buck and the Preacher, a western depicting Black cowboy heroes and countering decades of Hollywood’s whitewashed version of history. It was their first feature collaboration, after years of being close friends and fellow activists in the civil rights movement, and it marked Poitier’s directorial debut. Haizlip asked them an age-old question that comes with the territory of having achieved a certain level of fame and/or monetary success, especially if you’re Black: Did they find it difficult relating to those who knew them before the stardom, awards, and cultural influence?
It was a challenge at times, Poitier admitted, largely because structural barriers permitted only a few Black people to attain their level of success. Belafonte added: “We have used our power, we have used our craft, in order to set platforms for other artists to be able to project themselves, other Black artists. So that despite the inequities, despite the contradictions, within this society, it has not deterred us from a Black consciousness.”
In other words: Sidney and I have come a long way, but we have not forgotten where we come from.
Buck and the Preacher is in many ways an artistic answer to Haizlip’s question. The opening credits sequence sets the tone, with jazz legend Benny Carter’s bluesy, harmonica-inflected score and a montage of grainy, sepia-toned stills depicting nineteenth-century wagon trains and Black pioneers. A preamble unfurls historical context for what we’re about to see, conjuring the bitter legacy of America’s unfulfilled promises of land and freedom to the formerly enslaved in the post–Civil War era. Some of those Black people left the South and looked toward the western frontier, we’re told; yet they faced resistance from bounty hunters who tried to force them back onto the plantations.
“This picture is dedicated to those men, women, and children who lie in graves as unmarked as their place in history,” the scrolling title card concludes.
The movie begins with a few settlers staring off into the distance as a figure on horseback rides gallantly across the desert plains. It’s a classic image of Americana, but with a twist: this macho cowboy carved out in silhouette is a Black man. And that man is none other than Poitier as Buck, a wagon master who guides Black pioneers to unsettled land to begin their lives anew, not unlike the way that Harriet Tubman led the enslaved toward their freedom.
But as the preamble foreshadows, these Black settlers won’t know peace for long before they are bombarded by white mercenaries hired by Louisiana plantation owners to force them into returning to work in the fields. Deshay (Cameron Mitchell) and his armed gang storm the settlers’ camp, set it aflame, and shoot some of them and their livestock. Eventually, Buck will have to team up with the shady hustler “Reverend” Willis Oakes Rutherford (Belafonte) to take on Deshay and his men, with some assistance from Native American allies.
The movie might have looked different had its two stars not had so much control over how it got made. It was produced under their respective production companies, E & R Productions Corp. and Belafonte Enterprises, which gave them a degree of creative input they hadn’t previously had. Joseph Sargent, then known primarily as a television director, was tapped to direct Ernest Kinoy’s screenplay. Once production was underway in Mexico, however, it became clear after just a few days that Sargent, who was white, had a different creative vision than his leading men. “If the nature of the subject wasn’t such that it was, working and dealing as deeply with the Black psyche, it might not matter,” Belafonte reportedly said at the time. But it was, and it did. So they fired Sargent, and Poitier—who had already been contemplating trying his hand at directing—stepped in for what was supposed to be a temporary gig while the executives at Columbia Pictures searched for a permanent replacement.
That replacement was never found. Poitier stayed on, and Buck and the Preacher was made the way he and Belafonte had intended it: “As an entertainment with a statement—a positive statement about Black life in the United States.” Black people were a part of the history of the West too—even if the history books and Hollywood have so often pretended that they weren’t.
Context is key here: Directors sign on and then depart projects over “creative differences” all the time. But a white filmmaker being fired from a Hollywood production upon the orders of the movie’s two Black star-producers, and then replaced by one of them? In 1971, that would have been all but impossible to fathom. It was only a few years earlier that the famed photographer Gordon Parks had become the first Black person to helm a major studio film, The Learning Tree. Melvin Van Peebles (The Watermelon Man) and Ossie Davis (Cotton Comes to Harlem) soon followed, but even so, and even as relatively more opportunities arose for Black performers in that era, studio executives were not exactly tripping over themselves to put Black filmmakers in the director’s chair. (The Black family drama Sounder, for one, starring Cicely Tyson and released the same year as Buck and the Preacher, was directed by the white Martin Ritt.)
Of course, Columbia’s decision to let Poitier stay on as director must have been at least as much a financial calculation as it was an artistic one; halting production at that stage would have been costly. But the timing was important too. Since his debut in No Way Out in 1950, the actor had built up an impressive professional currency, becoming the first Black person to win the Oscar for Best Actor, in 1964, for his performance in Lilies of the Field, and the top box-office draw of 1967 thanks to In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and To Sir, With Love. And he had been studying the craft, and got his feet wet by directing a handful of scenes for They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970).
Even if Poitier happened into Buck and the Preacher as his first directing credit, it was the creative reset he needed to eventually make more films centering Black experiences, such as A Warm December (1973) and Uptown Saturday Night (1974). Not unlike his acting style, his directing in his debut is assured and measured, the action sequences deftly staged. A particularly effective moment occurs early on, when the camera rotates around Buck’s wife, Ruth (Ruby Dee), who is seated inside a small cabin, to reveal that she’s being held hostage by Deshay to lure Buck into an ambush. Poitier deploys this technique a few times throughout the film, and each time it’s driven by a clear narrative choice—providing an element of surprise, establishing mise-en-scène, building tension—rather than merely a desire to show off.
Buck, as written by Kinoy and played by Poitier, isn’t too far removed from most of the roles that had made the actor into Hollywood’s foremost Black leading man. He possesses no notable quirks or faults (see also: 1962’s Pressure Point, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) and is a figure of unassailable integrity and dignity (see also: Lilies of the Field, 1965’s A Patch of Blue). And as with plenty of other signature Poitier characters, Buck looks out for others as much as, if not more than, he does himself. But unlike with many of those earlier turns, Buck is firmly embedded here in the Black community around him, and his altruism serves those people and them alone. You won’t catch him jumping off any trains in solidarity with racists (as Poitier’s character does in 1958’s The Defiant Ones) or going out of his way to help bigots solve a murder (In the Heat of the Night).
For Belafonte, the role of Rutherford, the “preacher,” was more of a stretch. The character is a wisecracking con man who totes a gun inside his Bible and is at first more than willing to turn Buck in to Deshay for a reward. (To be fair, the title characters’ first encounter involves Buck stealing the preacher’s horse at gunpoint, and taking a bite out of his cooked rabbit too. The preacher’s grudge is understandable.) But as the film ambles along, the hustler experiences his own radicalization and is moved to team up with Buck in the cause of Black liberation. Belafonte dirtied up his matinee-idol looks with matted hair and yellowed teeth, and he plays the preacher loosely and comically, in a departure from the straighter, cooler roles he had inhabited in films such as Carmen Jones (1954) and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959).
Buck and the Preacher allowed its stars to reorient themselves as Black artists in Hollywood, and it seems safe to say they were able to do so, in this way, only because of the moment America was in. The cultural landscape was rapidly morphing: The old Hollywood studio system was crumbling, making way for a new wave of independent filmmaking and less industry censorship. The ideals of the civil rights movement were butting up against an increasingly prominent radical Black consciousness.
In many ways, Poitier and Belafonte represented and were products of those old guards. They had become established figures within the confines of “acceptable,” “nonthreatening” screen personae in so-called social-problem pictures, which would commit to being only so progressive in depicting Black people as full-fledged, complex human beings. (As radical as Poitier’s backhand slap in In the Heat of the Night to that racist old white guy in the greenhouse may have been, that was the same year the actor had to ingratiate himself with Spencer Tracy’s and Katharine Hepburn’s bigoted and slightly less bigoted characters as the practically perfect Dr. Prentice in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.) And offscreen, Poitier and Belafonte’s prominent activism had involved working with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose 1968 assassination gave way to disappointment and disillusionment as to what all those years spent peacefully protesting had been for.
At this point, they were both certainly used to being questioned about their place within The Black Community, that catchall designation for Black people’s ostensibly collective struggles, desires, and needs that is at once unifying and frustratingly limiting. For some critics, their palatability for white audiences was evidence that they were too safe, watered down. But while their tactics may have differed from those of a younger, more radicalized generation, they challenged white supremacy on their own terms. While guest-hosting The Tonight Show for a week in 1968, for example, Belafonte brought on political figures such as Dr. King, who was far from popular in the court of public opinion in the final months before his death. Belafonte received criticism from viewers for not speaking to “the other side” (i.e., the conservative side) of the debate around the Vietnam War and civil rights. His response, on his final night hosting the show? “I don’t think that’s necessary. The other sides to both issues are only too well represented in every media and in reality.”
Poitier and Belafonte took accusations of being sellouts in stride, though they certainly stung. “It was hurtful,” Poitier told Oprah Winfrey in 2000. “It was far from the truth, but I understood the times. There was a public display of all the rage that [Black people] had built up over centuries.” They were never going to be publicly enraged enough for some, because that just wasn’t in their nature artistically or politically. Buck isn’t searing like Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song or as bombastic as Shaft, but it states “I’m Black and I’m proud” in its own ways. It’s in how the camera frames Dee’s beautiful, expressive face in close-up, a soft lens giving her an ethereal glow. It’s in Ruth’s powerful monologue about her desire to make a new life in Canada, where she and Buck can abscond from this deeply ingrained, uniquely American brand of racism. It’s in the scene where the preacher does a little bit of shuckin’ and jivin’, to the delight of the oblivious Deshay and his men—calling up and subverting more than a century’s worth of Black stereotypes—so that he and Buck can catch them off guard and retaliate. (Belafonte really looks as though he’s having a ball in this scene-stealing role.)
Within this aged Hollywood genre, these artists were looking ahead as much as to the past. “There was a time when B and I were simply not able to make the kind of film that you’ve seen there,” Poitier told Haizlip during that interview on Soul! “Before B and I came along, they wouldn’t give Stepin Fetchit a part that was commensurate with his talent or his dignity as a human being. So we grew out of Stepin Fetchit. We grew out of Mantan Moreland. Out of us will come yet directors and producers who will have infinitely more freedom.”
The thing about progress, though, is that it’s not linear—it ebbs and flows. Poitier would spend the next couple of decades as a pretty successful director, reuniting with Belafonte for Uptown Saturday Night and working with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder on 1980’s Stir Crazy; both films were box-office hits. Even so, by the late seventies, after the blaxploitation era had flamed out, articles in the New York Times and elsewhere were already observing yet another dearth of Black representation, both on-screen and off. It would take many more stops and starts to get to where we are now, more than forty years later—with the likes of Ava DuVernay, Barry Jenkins, and others possessing “infinitely more freedom” than Poitier and his cohort had. Luckily, both Poitier and Belafonte lived to see the results of this evolution of which they were undoubtedly integral parts.
“You just one man,” Ruth tells Buck, making the case for him to retire with her, away from all this struggle.
“But I gave my word,” Buck says, sighing as he accepts the burden and honor of being a ray of hope for his people.
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