Description
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 Power–era 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 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-producer 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 HarrisNew illustration by Sean Phillips
Criterion Collection:
Since 1984, the Criterion Collection has been dedicated to publishing important classic and contemporary films from around the world in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements. No matter the medium—from laserdisc to DVD and Blu-ray to streaming—Criterion has maintained its pioneering commitment to presenting each film as its maker would want it seen, in state-of-the-art restorations with special features designed to encourage repeated watching and deepen the viewer’s appreciation of the art of film.
