Cinema: Bad Lot

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Films made expressly for black audiences are not so much a new genre as several old genres given a black twist. The latest type to be adapted is that venerable Hollywood standby, the western. Three current examples:

Soul Soldier, which concerns the adventures of a troop of "colored cavalry" in Texas shortly after the end of the Civil War, is so ragtag that it looks as if it might have been an aborted Poverty Program project. It features former Olympic Decathlon Champion Rafer Johnson as a stolid cavalryman who tried to keep peace with the Indians. Johnson is convincing, at least, in his stolidity.

The Legend of Nigger Charley is not much of an improvement. The plot comes more or less out of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, minus three. Charley is a freed slave who rides through the Southwest righting wrongs with the help of three companions. At one point, shortly after dispatching a gang of drunken louts in a saloon set-to, they help a white homesteader fight off the attacks of a band of marauding outlaws. Charley develops a yen for the homesteader's half-breed wife, portrayed by a comely young actress named Tricia O'Neill, who represents the only vaguely interesting quality in the movie.

Charley also boasts an ex-athlete in a starring role. As Nigger Charley, Fred Williamson (called "the Hammer" as a former halfback for pro football's Kansas City Chiefs) staggers through the whole film in what seems to be a mild state of concussion, as if he'd been roughed up in a scrimmage. Williamson and Johnson were apparently recruited not only for their athletic prowess but for their pectorals. Both are frequently required to shed their shirts and flex their chests. This provokes lustful cooings from any black women in the vicinity as well as envy and wrath from Whitey, who is generally a scrawny racist with a telltale gleam of madness in his eye.

Buck and the Preacher is the best of this bad lot. Directed by and co-starring Sidney Poitier, it is at least competently made and has a few, fleeting moments of genuine fun. Poitier plays Buck, a guide whose job is to get wagon trains of poor blacks through the terrors of testy Indians and the sudden, brutal raids of freebooters hired to steer the wagons back to Louisiana, where the blacks are needed on the farms. Much to his chagrin, Buck is abetted by a smarmy and slightly balmy preacher (Harry Belafonte) who has a fine eye for the ladies and a decided interest in storing up worldly goods.

Flashing a set of scrupulously blackened teeth, Belafonte overacts outrageously but amusingly. Poitier mostly contents himself with dispensing his standard Captain Marvel characterization. Even so, there are a couple of scenes — especially one where Buck talks quietly about an impending defeat — in which Poitier reminds us that he is still a superb actor. For the past few years, that has been all too easy to forget. · J.C.