by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, The Red Herring

In last month’s Printing the Legend, I looked at gender in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Belle Starr Story, two westerns that blurred the line between ‘buddy’ and ‘lover.’  Buck and the Preacher also features a central partnership, but it feels even closer to the spaghetti western model of one between uneasy allies rather than the kind that would die for each other. I watched Buck and the Preacher for the first time last year, in between seeing Nope and writing my review for MovieJawn. Watching it gave me a greater appreciation for what Jordan Peele was doing in his latest, but also reminded me to keep digging into this genre further to find these kinds of movies, and inspired the approach I’m taking for the second year of this column. I think Buck is better than Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and it’s not even close. Yet one movie has become iconic, and the other almost a footnote, despite starring one of the biggest Hollywood stars of all time. It’s not hard to guess why.

Made after Sidney Poitier starred in films that allowed non-bigoted white people to feel better about themselves like In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, Buck and the Preacher feels very different from those, in both origin and target audience. Rather than patting liberals on the back for not actively upholding segregation, it taps into the deep well of anger that stretches all the way back to the post-Civil War broken promise of “40 acres and a mule” (it’s no coincidence that is the name of Spike Lee’s production company). This intention is announced early on with this text invocation: 

This picture is dedicated to those men, women, and children who lie in graves as unmarked as their place in history,

Poitier, who co-produced as well as co-starred alongside Harry Belafonte, also directed after they fired original Joseph Sargent for not understanding the meaning behind the film enough. There had been all Black westerns as far back as the 1930s, but Buck and the Preacher was the first to come after the revisionist westerns of the 1950s and 60s. This positions the production not only after these, but after the major Civil Rights push by Black Americans in the 1960s. 

Set after the Civil War, Buck (Poitier), leads wagon trains of Black people out of Louisiana and into Kansas for them to settle and escape the intense racism of the South. To do this, Buck has made arrangements with the Native Americans in the area for safe passage and limited buffalo hunting. Louisiana plantation owners hire some mercenaries to stop Buck and prevent this flight of African Americans out of their sphere of influence. Buck is warned by his wife, Ruth (Ruby Dee), and is able to escape. He randomly meets Reverend Willis Oaks Rutherford (Belafonte), a sort of snake oil preacher, and the two forge a partnership to stop the mercenaries and ensure the wagon train’s survival. 

The new Criterion Collection release of Buck and the Preacher helped add a lot of context for this viewing, especially in terms of the genre. Mia Mask, author of Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western (which I intend to read as soon as I can), talks about the ways Poitier and Belafonte are pushing back against the whitewashing of the cowboy. Real Black men like Britton Johnson and Bass Reeves were the inspiration for some of our most iconic cowboys, in this case, John Wayne’s character in The Searchers and The Lone Ranger, respectively. Even the name of Poitier’s character, Buck, is a reclamation of the Black Buck stereotype, as this is a Black man egged into violence because of the relentless antagonism of white men. 

Mask also points out that Ruby Dee plays a large role in the film, not only forewarning Buck, but riding alongside him and Preacher. It is her words, talking about the poison of hatred that has soaked into the American soil and her worries about how far they will have to journey to find peace, that form the movie’s emotional center. Furthermore, the scenes between Buck and the Native Americans he has negotiated with heavily reference his likely history as a Buffalo soldier fighting for the U.S. Calvary in territory conflicts with Indigenous people after the Civil War. There is a tension and a sorrow that underlines these scenes and brings to the foreground a parallel between the struggles of both peoples against the white hegemony. Buck and the Preacher was released four years before The Outlaw Josey Wales and yet it was already the perfect antidote to that vile hijacking of Indigenous struggles to align with the Lost Cause myth. 

All of these issues are endemic to the story being told in this picture, and what results is an engaging and sometimes violent western brimming with righteous indignation and a reclamation of lost heritage. On second watch, Buck and the Preacher has cemented itself among my very favorites in the genre. Aisha Harris’ essay for Criterion gives some great background on the careers of Poitier, Belafonte, and Dee, who are a joy to watch on screen, especially together. Buck also offers great action as well as some unexpected comedic moments, which allows it to deal with heavy subjects while making the film relatively easy to digest. Also add it to the list of movies that Quentin Tarantino borrowed from (this was a clear influence for Django Unchained, specifically) that are far better and more thoughtful than his own work. 

Buck and the Preacher has made me reconsider a bunch of things about this genre as well as Hollywood history, which also points to why I love digging into the western genre so much. While blaxploitation movies like Shaft and Dolemite are equally important for telling stories about the Black urban experience, the common landscape of the west offers a genre in conversation itself, as well with the way we think of American history. Buck and the Preacher isn’t alternate history, but resurrects stories that have been whitewashed or erased and allows them to bypass school education as a popular correction to the established narratives. And it looks damn good doing it.