Buck and the Preacher
classified 12APlease note: This was screened in March 2023
Widely regarded at the time of its release as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with a social conscience, Buck and the Preacher is a superbly crafted revisionist landmark, subverting Hollywood conventions at every turn and reclaiming the Western genre in the name of Black liberation.
Buck (Sidney Poitier) is an ex-Union Army Cavalry sergeant who becomes a scout for freed slaves heading to the Colorado frontier. Tagging along with him are his wife (Ruby Dee) and a con artist known as the Preacher (Harry Belafonte). Attacked by racist bounty hunters who are determined to return the former slaves to a life of sharecropping in Louisiana, Buck and his followers must summon all the courage they have in order to reach their destination and help settle the Wild West.
Celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2022 and hitting our cinema screens in a new 4K restoration, Sidney Poitier's rousingly entertaining directorial debut helped rewrite the history of the Western, bringing Black heroes to a genre in which they had previously been sorely underrepresented.