Buck and the Preacher: Unsettled Land

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.

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.)

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.