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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 slow burn isn’t a problem, but one that fails to eventually ignite is a problem. Instead we just get a traversal through the greatest hits of the western, a genre that was experiencing more than a little rust around the joints by 1972. At least we get to watch Poitier and Belafonte act opposite each other. By turns teasing, antagonistic, and brotherly, they bring their off-screen friendship and chemistry to the big screen and prove that sometimes merely watching movie stars existing is a good enough excuse to stick a camera in the room.
