Buck and the Preacher (1972)

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With his rousingly entertaining directorial debut, Sidney Poitier helped rewrite the history of the western, bringing Black heroes to a genre in which they had always been sorely underrepresented. Combining boisterous buddy comedy with blistering, Black Power–era political fury, Poitier and a marvelously mischievous Harry 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 recently freed enslaved people. 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.

Special Features:

New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack

New interview with Mia Mask, author of Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western

Behind-the-scenes footage featuring actor-director Sidney Poitier and actor Harry Belafonte

Interviews with Poitier and Belafonte from 1972 episodes of Soul! and The Dick Cavett Show

New interview with Gina Belafonte, daughter of Harry Belafonte

English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

PLUS: An essay by critic Aisha Harris