Buck and the Preacher
With his rousingly entertaining directorial debut, Sidney Poitier, alongside actor-producer Harry Belafonte, helped rewrite the history of the Western.
Combining boisterous buddy comedy with blistering, Black Power–era political fury, Poitier and a marvellously mischievous 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 people recently emancipated from slavery.
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. It is also to Poitier's credit both as director and star that he's willing to allow Belafonte to chew up the scenery and steal the acting honours with a hysterical, outrageous performance.