Buck and the Preacher (Blu-Ray)

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 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