Sidney Poitier made his directorial debut with Buck and the Preacher in 1972, and the move put him in a place no Black filmmaker had occupied in a major-studio Western before. He also starred as Buck, a wagon master guiding former slaves westward from Louisiana after the Civil War.
1972 and the studio barrier
The film’s central figure is Buck, and Poitier played him while also directing the production. That dual role matters because the project was not built around a conventional Western hero; it centered Black characters moving through a genre that had long narrowed their experience.
Revisionist Westerns question rather than celebrate frontier violence, and Buck and the Preacher fits that pattern by treating the frontier as a place of survival, alliance, and negotiation rather than myth. It also places Black cowboys alongside Native Americans, which gives the film a different social map than the genre’s usual template.
Joseph Sargent and the handoff
Joseph Sargent was the white director originally hired to oversee production, but Poitier fired him and stood in for him. That shift leaves a clean read on authorship: the final film carries Poitier’s stamp in front of the camera and behind it.
Harry Belafo appears in the source’s cast list, but the key business decision was Poitier taking control of a Western for a major studio in 1972. On a system level, that broke a racial barrier in a genre that had historically minimized Black experience and left the screen version of the frontier looking smaller than the country it claimed to depict.
Bill Pickett to Poitier
Bill Pickett had already appeared in early Black cowboy films, including The Bull-Dogger and The Crimson Skull, and Harlem Rides The Range followed in 1939. Woody Strode later starred as the titular soldier in Sergeant Rutledge and appeared as a gunslinger in Once Upon a Time in the West, but Poitier’s film pushed the director’s chair into new territory.
Bill Pickett was inducted into the National Rodeo Hall of Fame in 1972, the same year Buck and the Preacher reached theaters. That overlap makes Poitier’s film look less like an isolated oddity and more like part of a longer Black Western lineage that Hollywood had left underused.
2022 after the debut
Poitier died at 94 in 2022, which leaves Buck and the Preacher as a durable proof point in his career rather than a footnote. The film still reads as underappreciated because it did more than place a Black star in a Western; it put a Black director in command of one, and that is the more consequential fact.
