Buck and the Preacher

I had a couple more Sidney Poitier movies to get through before my old DVR died. There are one or two unwatched, but I did get to see Buck and the Preacher, which was also Poitier's directorial debut.

The scene is a couple of years after the Civil War. The slaves have been freed legally, but southern whites aren't about to lose their grip on power, so they tried to prevent blacks from acquiring land and kept blacks as sharecroppers. Understandably there were blacks who didn't like this and wanted a better life, so they headed west to get the free land that was still being offered under the Homestead Act. Buck (Poitier) is a scout for the wagon trains leading such blacks west.

However, there are people trying to stop the wagon trains. There are Indians, who see that the advance of blacks is no better for them than all the whites settling their historic territories, and they demand tribute from wagon trains in exchange for free passage. There are also "night riders", whites who harass the black wagon trains and try to get them to turn around to go back to the South.

One such band attacks Buck, forcing him to make a hasty escape, to the point that it's going to kill his horse if he doesn't get his horse some needed rest. Thankfully, he runs across another black guy, a phony preacher named Willis (Harry Belafonte), who has taken a break from his itinerant ministry to bathe in a nearby river. So Buck takes it upon himself to take the Preacher's horse!

The Preacher takes Buck's horse and rides into town, where Deshay (Cameron Mitchell), the head of the night riders, questions the Preacher about where Buck is. The Preacher doesn't care about Buck at first, until he joins up with one of the wagon trains and sees the damage that the night riders are doing to black people. They've killed some of the settlers and taken all of their money that they're going to need for passage, and all of this gets the Preacher to form an uneasy alliance with Buck to go after the whites.

However, in the attempt to get the settlers' money back, Buck and the Preacher are going to commit actual crimes that are going to get the local sheriff to join up somewhat with the night riders. Previously, the sheriff's attitude was that none of these people had committed any crimes in the sheriff's jurisdiction. But now, Buck has, and Deshay can use that to his advantage.

Buck and the Preacher is a movie with a good story that I found ultimately wound up being less than the sum of its parts. I think one reason for that is that I've never been a fan of Harry Belafonte the actor, he being the weak link in a lot of the movies he's in. Another ws that the movie needed to take a bit more of a comic tone. There's something about the material that needs a lovable rogue rather than somebody who's deadpan serious playing Buck. The direction is competent, if stuck in the 70s with its zooms.

Still, Buck and the Preacher is certainly worth one watch, and you can get it on DVD.