Passings #2: Sidney Poitier, Buck and the Preacher (1972, dir by Sidney Poitier, USA)
“Where you gonna find that money?”
“I don’t know.”
“If it were me, I’d look for money where money’s kept. Like in a bank, or an express office.”
When the great Sidney Poitier died in January, there was much talk about In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Lilies of the Field, all of his most well-known films, but I also heard about this film for the first time, Buck and the Preacher, a western starring Poitier and Harry Belafonte, and Poitier’s directorial debut, and I knew that this was the film I had to watch in tribute to him.
The film takes place post Civil War, and all of the Black characters were formerly enslaved. When you look at Sidney Poitier, you don’t think enslaved person, but at this time and place, that is the reality. Everyone is trying to live their lives and make a home and family for themselves, but that is easier said than done.
Sidney Poitier is Buck, a wagon master who leads wagon trains of these formerly enslaved people west to land that they can buy and farm, but there is a group of white men who keep breaking up the trains, killing the men and animals, raping the women, led by a man in a civil war army uniform. Interestingly, it is blue, not grey, because the South doesn’t own racism.
These men are not mere whites supremacists or KKK, they are hired by plantation owners in Louisiana to discourage these people from trying to make it on their own, to give up and go back to Louisiana to pick cotton on the cheap. This was apparently a real thing that I had never heard of before.
The white men want to kill Buck so that he will stop leading these wagon trains, and in running from an ambush where they staked out his home and used his wife (the great Ruby Dee) as bait, Buck comes across Preacher (Harry Belafonte), a con man, and steals his horse. Trading his original horse for Preacher’s horse, but it’s still stealing. This means that when the white marauders see that horse, they go after Preacher, eventually offering him $500 to tell them where Buck is, when he finds him.
So Buck and the Preacher don’t exactly start off best buddies, but they end up so, along with Ruby Dee, robbing a bank and ambushing a brothel to get back money stolen from the wagon train.
The native Americans also help the Exodusters, though they will not fight for them, as they have their own problems, and remember when the Blacks and whites both fought the natives together. The chief’s (Enrique Lucero) wife and interpreter is played by Julie Robinson, who was Harry Belafonte‘s wife at the time.
This is a good movie, quite enjoyable, and unique in that there aren’t a lot of movies about the post-slavery Black experience in the Old West. It is very obviously seen through the lens of the American Civil Rights movement of the time.
Poitier is a real dreamboat in this film, so handsome, so stoic, contrasted by Belafonte, who we remember as being clean cut and beautiful, but as Preacher, he has shaggy hair, a patchy beard, and chaw-stained teeth. He practically shucks and jives part of the time, but always for a reason, always to distract white people from his real aim, or to save his own skin. He and Buck are at opposite ends of almost everything, but they end up realizing that their goals are similar.
Ruby Dee is just perfect, all she wants is to live a happy life with Buck, away from this terrible place, and she’ll do anything to achieve that.
You never guessed that this was a directorial debut, Poitier shows himself to be a great storyteller. I wish he had directed more, and too many of his films are unfortunately full of Bill Cosby, but this one is definitely worth discovering.
Rest well, Sidney Poitier.
Kymm Zuckert is an actor/writer/native Angelino. When Kymm was a child, her parents would take her to see anything, which means that sometimes she will see a film today and say, “I saw that when I was eight, I don’t remember any of that inappropriate sex stuff!” Check out her entire 365 day blog @ https://365filmsin365days.movie.blog