Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

The serio-comic African-American western "Buck and the Preacher," starring Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, certainly wasn't the first black horse opera, but it may reign as the most prestigious. For the record, the earliest known African-American western was a silent movie, "The Crimson Skull" (1922), that dealt with a cowboy who thwarted rustlers by wearing a skeleton costume. Fifty years later, "Buck and the Preacher" came out. Not only does it qualify as a good, entertaining western, director Sidney Poitier and co-star Harry Belafonte sought to make an oater that chronicled the tribulations facing African-Americans who had uprooted themselves from the post-antebellum South and were heading westward to start new lives that had nothing to do with slavery. Cast as a former Union soldier with the rank of sergeant, Buck became a wagon master who escorted freedom seeking slaves to new lands. The conflict in "Buck and the Preacher" grows out of this exodus from Louisiana, and the appointed representatives of those plantations that dispatched desperadoes, such as evil Beau Deshay (Cameron Mitchell of "Garden of Evil"), who gathered a small army to terrorize blacks and compel them to turn back and pick up where they had left off. At one point, one of Beau's relatives who survived told a lawman that an old way of life had to be maintained. The sheriff of Copper Springs (John Kelly of "The Revengers") warns Deshay to 'walk softly' in his town because the migrating blacks are committing any crimes. Instead, the sheriff is intent on hunting down Buck (Sidney Poitier of "Lilies of the Field") and the Reverend Willis Oakes Rutherford (Harry Belafonte of "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil") after they shoot up Copper Springs and rob the bank. Although they are breaking the law, Buck and the Preacher have struggled to recover the money that Deshay's mob has stolen from them. When Buck counts only $157 left over from some fourteen hundred dollars, the Preacher suggests that they rob the bank.Mind you, "Buck and the Preacher" depicts an on-again, off-again friendship between the two eponymous characters. Initially, Buck steals the Reverend's horse because he has ridden his own horse into the ground. Buck is fleeing from Deshay and his rabid gun hands, and Deshay knows that he has been leading the African-American settlers. Buck not only appropriates the Reverend's fresh mount, but he also helps himself to a rabbit roasting over a campfire. The screenplay by Ernest Kinoy, who scripted an earlier Poitier movie "Brother John," slickly pits our two protagonists against each other until they can become as thick as thieves. Deshay and his gun hands encounter the Reverend Rutherford in the hamlet of Frenchman's Ford since they have been trailing Buck's horse. Instead of killing the silver-tongued Reverend, Deshay dangles the prospect of $500 in the Reverend's face for word about the whereabouts of Buck. Eventually, Buck and the Preacher cross trails again, and Buck still doesn't have any use for the garrulous Preacher. Indeed, he believes the Preacher cannot be trusted. The Preacher administers a blow to Buck and rightfully claims his horse. Buck swaps horses before he sets out to lead the newest caravan of pioneers.In case it isn't clear, Deshay and his despicable gun hands are prepared to kill some of the settlers and burn their wagons with their sole possessions in order to turn them around. Eventually, Buck and the Preacher catch up with Deshay and his hooligans. They find these murderous cutthroats in Madame Esther's bordello and a gunfight ensues, with Buck demonstrating the power of his special arsenal of hand guns. Forged by a gunsmith in Fort Leavenworth, Buck wields a pair of heavy calibered weapons. Indeed, he must reload them because they hold only two bullets each, but the wallop that these firearms pack down cut a man down like a scythe. Deshay and most of those around him, aside from his relative Floyd (Denny Miller of "Tarzan, the Ape Man"), die in the gunfight at the bordello. Floyd rides with the sheriff's posse to catch Buck and the Preacher. In a sense, Buck and the Reverend Willis Oakes Rutherford aren't conventional heroes. They are battling not only the villains, but they also contend with a world that treated African-Americans as second-class citizens. "Buck and the Preacher marked Sidney Poitier's debut as a film director. Poitier and Belafonte had hired Joseph Sargent, director of "White Lightning" and "Colossus, the Forbin Project," but Sargent and his two leading actors had a difference of opinion. They fired Sargent, and Columbia Pictures couldn't find a replacement on such late notice, so Poitier took the helm. "Buck and the Preacher" is as western as all get out.

Hollywood would have us imagine the western migration as an all-white experience. This picture tells the story with black actors, although facing the same menace they flee, racism. The antagonists are a gang of "night-riders" both hunting Buck, but also terrorizing the black wagon-train. My main complaint is a terribly annoying, invasive soundtrack, featuring a Jew's Harp of all things. (Like blues harmonica, a little goes a long way!)

There's a combination of tragedy and triumph here as Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte combine their light-hearted personalities into emotional drama with this story of two men who, at first on opposite sides of the spectrum, find a common cause in fighting against bigotry. Poitier is a former Northern soldier who has been helping newly freed slaves go west with little help from the vigilantes hired by plantation owners in getting what they still believe their property back so they can continue living "their right way of life". The vigilantes are horrible white men who have no qualms in destroying an entire camp, killing men, women and children, in their efforts to scare these people back into slavery. It is almost like a modernized version of "The Ten Commandments" in that sense, with this group of men the equivalent of Edward G. Robinson's Dathan, and Moses being seen in the forms of Buck and his reluctant partner, a traveling preacher who initially agreed to be informer for the white vigilantes.There's a lot to like about this moving drama with a western setting, and when Ruby Dee, as Poitier's long-suffering wife, reveals how she longs to raise her children far away from even any memory of slavery, you really feel what the millions of slaves must have felt after they were allegedly freed but could not get what was promised to them, still facing adversity for decades after the end of the civil war. Poitier and Belafonte make such a great team and give such a light-hearted performance that at times, it doesn't seem like they are acting. There's a lot of sadness in the light-hearted structure of the story, including the attacks on the innocent people striving to find a new land and their dealings with the Native Americans who are fighting their own struggle against the racist white men determined to steal everything from these people that they can get their hands on. Nita Talbot, usually comical as an Eve Arden type wise-cracker, plays serious here as a madam, and Cameron Mitchell out-does the villainy he had played decades earlier in "Carousel" with a character so vile that you can't wait to see him dispatched.

this movie goes down as one of the best westerns.. ever produced... buck(sidney poitier) helps a group of black settlers.... move west... from louisiana... from the get-go.. he meets up with... a con-man... the preacher(harry belafonte).... as they show displeasure amongst each other... the plot thickens.. when the settlers are being forced back home..... Buck has other ideas... as the indians... are on his side and pave the way,.... there are casualties... and solid acting amonst poitier-belafonte-ruby dee and cameron mitchell... the setting is the late 1800's after the civil war... and tells a chilling story.... this movie will make you both laugh and cry.... and has 10-written all over it.... both poitier and belafonte(very funny man).... excelled in this flick.... stay with it... you won't be disappointed... some solid music also helps the movie along... kick back and enjoy... i have.. many times!!!