Sooooo, I saw Buck and the Preacher.
Maybe since I honestly hadn't watched many westerns in my life prior to last year, and have been taking on a lot of greats over the last 12 months, I'm taking the masters and masterpieces of the genre for granted. Save the white-washing of the frontier for a second, and we are talking about directors like Ford, Leone, Hawks, etc., utilizing all of the daunting scenery of the West and putting together perfect sets for their pictures. Buck and the Preacher switched directors to Sidney Poitier after the initial results were bad, so maybe he salvaged this from being a wreck, but to me it looks like a TV movie with bad character acting nearly across the board. Only Poitier and Ruby Dee seemed really game; Belafonte is some awful cartoon character, his Preacher so grating, talk about chewing scenery, and every one of the white characters seems trapped in one western trope or another. The visual cheapness of this film was the thing that bugged me most about it. It's cut coherently enough, but a lot of the gun fighting is mediocre, let's hide around this rock, stupid guy comes around a corner, jump out and smoke him kind of thing. After watching Charles Burnett perfectly film a $10,000 slice of life in Watts, I'd only wished Poitier and his crew had 1/100th of the vision, really had any ideas of how they wanted to use the space in which they filmed, because thematically, this is such a vital piece. You have a story probably a lot of people don't know or hear about the Black people that headed west after slavery was abolished to truly be good and free, a group called Exodusters. It's not a story I can really say I know, so I'm happy to have encountered this film just for that. You also have a coalition between the indigenous people and Black people that, while it certainly begins quid pro quo in nature, ends up being about solidarity in the end. And it's not about finding the redeemable white man. There is only one, and we'll just say he's not central to the production. In this regard, everything is so lined-up for me, this is what I want to see, minorities telling vital stories that everyone should know. But it still has to be good cinema. To me, this is not.