Malcolm X (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Produced by Marvin Worth and Spike Lee; directed by Spike Lee; written by Arnold Perl and Spike Lee, based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X with Alex Haley; cinematography by Ernest Dickerson; edited by Barry Alexander Brown; production design by Wynn Thomas; art direction by Tom Warren; music score by Terence Blanchard; starring Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, Albert Hall, Al Freeman Jr., Delroy Lindo, Spike Lee, Theresa Randle, Kate Vernon, Lonette McKee, Tommy Hollis, James McDaniel, Ernest Thomas, Jean-Claude La Marre, O.L. Duke, Larry McCoy, Maurice Sneed, Debi Mazar, Phyllis Yvonne Stickney, Miki Howard, Ricky Gordon, Shirley Stoler, Bobby Seale, Al Sharpton, Christopher Plummer, Karen Allen, Peter Boyle, William Kunstler, and Nelson Mandela. Blu-ray or 4K UHD, color, 201 min., 1992. A Criterion Collection release.

During production of his 1992 epic Malcolm X, director Spike Lee heard a constant plea from people on the street who’d read or heard about the project: “Don’t mess this up, don’t mess up Malcolm’s life!” Lee recalls this in multiple extras for the Criterion Collection’s thirtieth-anniversary release of the picture, but he doesn’t mention that some highly prominent Black figures were fiercely skeptical of his abilities and motivations; one was the author and activist Amiri Baraka, who believed that a superficial entertainer like Lee would inevitably mess things up, declaring at a Harlem rally in 1991, “We will not let Malcolm X’s life be trashed to make middle-class Negroes sleep easier.” When the film arrived, critics tended to be positive but underwhelmed. The introduction to the “Malcolm X Symposium: By Any Means Necessary” organized by Cineaste in 1992 stated the general consensus well: “What had been expected to be at least as controversial as Oliver Stone’s JFK [1991] turned out to be a relatively bland biopic…a kind of ‘Malcolm for Beginners,’ placing stress on themes of personal redemption in a cinematic style thought most appropriate for younger people and a crossover audience.” The film’s conventional style was especially ironic given that a white filmmaker, Norman Jewison, had been slated for the picture until Lee raised a ruckus, arguing vociferously that only a Black person could properly handle this quintessentially Black subject. “With a film of this magnitude,” he told a New York Times interviewer, “I wouldn’t trust a white to direct [because] they just don’t know what it feels like. There’s stuff I go through every day—I still cannot get a cab in New York! I don’t care how many books they read, or if they grew up with a black nanny, or what friends they had.” Be this as it may, Malcolm X emerged from his hands as a politically progressive, cinematically adroit, dramatically expansive showpiece. Its 201-minute running time was probably to blame for the so-so ticket sales of its initial run, but it looks as splendid as ever in the new edition, and thanks to the magic of home video, the running time is no problem at all.           

The film is closely based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the indispensable 1965 self-portrait written by Malcolm with the author and journalist Alex Haley, which Lee says he still rereads every year. He begins his adaptation with his own brand of gut-punch contemporary impact. Behind the opening titles an American flag goes up in flames, intercut with images of urban conflict and violence, including the police beating of motorist Rodney King in 1991, an atrocity that sparked ferocious riots in Los Angeles when the officers were acquitted just as Lee was wrapping up his production. The narrative itself begins on a more buoyant note, introducing Malcolm Little (Denzel Washington) in his early days as a hustler known as Detroit Red, jiving and jazzing with his homeboy Shorty (Lee) while repressing traumatic childhood memories of his father’s murder by violent racists, his mother’s mental decline, and his years in foster care, all of which are signaled in brief flashbacks. This portion of the film has been criticized for lingering on people and events having little to do with Malcolm’s mature life and historical importance, but Lee sees his youthful escapades as integral to his life story, and while they don’t directly relate to the episodes that follow, they launch the movie with enjoyable bursts of energy and dance, paying tribute to the Technicolor musicals Lee has always loved (the first hugely kinetic shot cost more than a million dollars in itself).

The story then continues in carefully structured stages, each marked by a distinctive look, as cinematographer Ernest Dickerson points out in the Criterion audio commentary. Migrating to Boston in the Forties, teenage Malcolm has wild times in the company of Shorty and a new white girlfriend, then moves to Harlem and becomes a protégé of West Indian Archie (Delroy Lindo), a hoodlum who inducts him into the numbers racket before attacking him over a disputed bet. Fleeing to Boston and setting up a small-time burglary ring, Malcolm is arrested and sent to prison, a seeming misfortune that changes the direction of his life when an inmate named Baines (Albert Hall) tells him about Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, a then-rising organization whose celebration of Blackness and demonization of whiteness strikes a powerful chord in the discontented young man. Six years later he leaves prison, meets Muhammad (Al Freeman Jr.) at his Chicago headquarters, changes his name to Malcolm X, goes back to Harlem, and becomes a charismatic spokesperson for Muhammad’s ideology; he also meets and marries Betty Sanders (Angela Bassett), the film’s only substantial female character. His influence arouses jealousy in highly placed Black Muslims who turn against him, and frictions with Muhammad grow when Malcolm learns of the many out-of-wedlock children the leader has fathered in stark contravention of his moral teachings. In the last great stage of Malcolm’s development, he makes the mandatory Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca and discovers that people of all races and colors, Caucasians included, can be devout Muslims and loving human beings. Making a final break with Muhammad, he changes his name to el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, founds the racially tolerant Organization of Afro-American Unity, barely escapes injury when thugs firebomb his home, and meets his death in 1965 while giving a speech in a Harlem auditorium. The assassins may come from the Nation of Islam, the FBI, the CIA, or all of these, but Lee points the finger at Black Muslims.           

Malcolm X traveled a long road before reaching the screen. Rights to the Autobiography were owned by Hollywood producer Marvin Worth, who went through a long list of directors (Jewison, Sidney Lumet, Bob Fosse, Mark Rydell) and writers (James Baldwin, David Mamet, Calder Willingham, Charles Fuller, Arnold Perl) in his efforts to set up a workable production. Lee came along at a propitious moment. Sales of the Autobiography had increased threefold in recent years; Washington had become an Academy Award-winning star; Lee was confident of his ability to work on a grander scale than in the past; and Warner Bros. felt the time was right. Lee’s favorite of the existing screenplays was the one by Perl, whose credits included Bert Stern’s 1959 Jazz on a Summer’s Day and Ossie Davis’s 1970 Cotton Comes to Harlem; rewriting it, Lee inserted painful conflicts between Malcolm and Muhammad that Perl had omitted because Muhammad was then alive. To prevent the Nation of Islam from raising objections, Lee met with Muhammad’s successor, Louis Farrakhan, who gave a green light and eventually praised the completed picture; he also enlisted the Nation’s defense arm, the Fruit of Islam, to provide security for the production. Tensions arose with Warner Bros. when Lee announced his insistence on a three-hour-plus final cut, leading the production’s insurance backers to cut off further funding. Lee appealed to Black celebrities (Oprah Winfrey, Janet Jackson, Michael Jordan, et al.) for support, which promptly came through, permitting pricey options such as shooting the pilgrimage scenes in Egypt and Mecca instead of New Jersey as the studio wanted; while most of the photography took place within hailing distance of Lee’s beloved Brooklyn, this was the first commercial production granted permission to film in Mecca, where non-Muslims are traditionally denied entry. Lee’s own religiosity is of the nonorganized variety, but he has voiced deep respect for Islam, as has Washington, who showed his commitment to the production by steeping himself in Malcolm’s life and work while learning Arabic and following Muslim rules of spiritual dedication and dietary discipline. “Every day we started and ended the day with a prayer,” he told me and a few other journalists shortly before the film’s premiere. “I did, anyway.” Like the director, he wanted to see this as more than just a movie.            

It is a movie, of course, and it’s influenced by other movies in all sorts of ways, as Lee and Dickerson acknowledge in the Criterion audio commentary, where editor Barry Alexander Brown and costume designer Ruth Carter also chime in. Watching the 1989 restoration of David Lean’s 1962 Lawrence of Arabia, both Lee and Dickerson had been most impressed by (surprisingly) the vivid close-ups, which they emulated in their own biopic. A playful shot of young Malcolm falling on his face imitates the unplayful finale of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951); the buildup to the conclusion is modeled on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II (1974); and Gordon Willis’s dark lighting in the Godfather films has inspired Dickerson’s entire career. Taking a cue from the artful use of pop music in Martin Scorsese’s films, Lee memorably deploys Sam Cooke’s 1964 hit “A Change Is Gonna Come” in a scene for which it could have been written, and the 1965 song “Shotgun” by Junior Walker and the All-Stars, heard at a party the night before the assassination, is one of many details (popping flashbulbs are another) that foreshadow Malcolm’s death by gunfire. Concern over the MPAA rating also played a part in the movie’s content; in a scene involving cocaine, you never see the powder going into anyone’s nose, since a visible snort would have mandated an R instead of the PG-13 that would (and did) allow a larger and younger audience.

The most notable extra in the Criterion release is another film titled Malcolm X, this one directed by Perl, co-produced by Worth, and nominated for an Oscar as best feature documentary of 1972. Narrated by James Earl Jones, it’s both a useful supplement and an occasional corrective to Lee’s picture, giving a more forceful picture of the anti-white extremism that Malcolm bought into when he was a devoted Muhammad disciple, complete with racist origin myths (“the devil,” a Black Muslim explains, “is the white man, who was grafted from the black man 6,000 long years ago”) and rejection of racial integration. Another first-rate extra is a video interview with the veteran composer Terence Blanchard, whose score for Lee’s Malcolm X was only his second outing, following Lee’s Jungle Fever a year earlier. His music for Malcolm X is dramatic, lighthearted, and magisterial by turns, moving from the somber opening—bass drum evoking a heartbeat, trumpet representing Malcolm, cellos soulfully responding—to the mournful English horn in the assassination’s grim aftermath. It is a bravura achievement.           

I have always detected a touch of the preacher in Lee, and he closes Malcolm X with a rousingly didactic flourish, geared to staving off the “angry Black man” image often pinned on Malcolm and other activists. The sequence underscores the leader’s enduring importance with a montage of faces and voices—archival shots of Malcolm, words of tribute from Martin Luther King, the eulogy delivered at Malcolm’s funeral by the frequent Lee collaborator Ossie Davis, schoolchildren shouting out their solidarity, and a Malcolm X quotation spoken by Nelson Mandela, one of the few civil-rights champions with similarly towering stature. Although he was happy to participate in the film, Mandela declined to repeat the words of Malcolm that appear in the closing credits of almost every Lee film—“by any means necessary”—because of how easily his enemies in the South African government could twist them to portray him as an advocate of violence. Lee fills the gap by cutting from Mandela to a clip of Malcolm himself proclaiming the four mighty words, the only time his own voice is heard on the soundtrack. It’s a hard-hitting finish to a flawed but monumental film that remains all too timely amid today’s ongoing racial frictions. Spike didn’t make a masterpiece, but he definitely didn’t mess up Malcolm’s life.

David Sterritt is editor-in-chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, film professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and author or editor of fifteen film-related books including Spike Lee's America.

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