Buck and the Preacher

Buck and the Preacher

“Sidney Poitier’s directorial debut is a western that continually threatens to be more interesting than it is. The story concerns Buck (Poitier) leading a wagon train of newly freed slaves westward, Preacher (Harry Belafonte), a greedy ex-con posing as a man of the word, and Deshay (Cameron Mitchell) and his crew of night riders in hot pursuit. There’s brief glimpses of racial tensions and the realities of the newly freed slaves, including their tense peace with the indigenous people whose land they’ll be traveling through, but they’re quickly dosed off for an uneasy combination of well-worn clichés and flip-flopping between comedy and drama.   A largely black version of a western buddy movie sounds like a winning prospect on paper, but you must give us action and payoff. A slo” read more