By the early 1970s, the cultural moment that had made Sidney Poitier’s particular combination of qualities — his formal elegance, his moral seriousness, his integrationist heroism — legible and commercially powerful was changing.
American film was changing. The new Hollywood directors — Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman — were making films that deliberately rejected the kind of unambiguous moral clarity that had characterized the best of Poitier’s earlier work. Antihero stories, ambiguous protagonists, films that refused the clean resolution. The audience was changing too, and its appetite for what Poitier represented was changing with it.
Buck and the Preacher, released in 1972, was Poitier’s directorial debut. He also starred in it, alongside his old friend Harry Belafonte, in a revisionist Western that told the story of freed slaves trying to make their way to Kansas and the obstacles placed in their path by white thieves and exploiters. The film was a deliberate departure from the integrationist framework of his earlier work — these were Black characters whose story was primarily about their relationship to their own freedom and their own community.
He continued to work as a director through the 1970s and 1980s. He acted in fewer films. The films he made as a director were often comedies — Uptown Saturday Night (1974), Let’s Do It Again (1975), A Piece of the Action (1977) — popular with Black audiences and commercially viable, but not the kind of work that attracted the critical prestige his earlier acting roles had earned.
The role of the actor who had integrated American film, who had made history at the Oscar ceremony, who had been the target of both celebration and critique, was not a role he could put down. It followed him. He addressed it in interviews with a combination of candor and weariness — the candor of a man who had thought carefully about what he had done and why, the weariness of a man who had spent decades being asked to represent more than any individual person can reasonably represent.