Buck and the Preacher (#1140)

With his rousingly entertaining directorial debut, Sidney Poitier, alongside actor-producer Harry Belafonte, 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 Powerera political fury, Poitier and a marvelously mischievous 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 people recently emancipated from slavery. A superbly crafted revisionist landmark,Buck and the Preachersubverts 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 ofBlack Rodeo: A History of the African American Western
• Behind-the-scenes footage featuring actor-director Sidney Poitier and actor-producer Harry Belafonte
• Interviews with Poitier and Belafonte from 1972 episodes ofSoul!andThe 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