Books, Arts & Manners: Biopics

INTO his short life, Malcolm X (1925-1965) packed many careers, from criminal to ascetic; and many ideologies, from extremist white-hating black nationalism to some sort of incipient tolerance and ecumenism. I know no more about the Black Muslim orator and organizer than anyone would who lived in New York City during the first lustrum of the Sixties, when Malcolm X’s rise within the Nation of Islam, expulsion, and murder made headlines, and I am not especially qualified to assess the value of Spike Lee’s three-hour-and-twenty-one-minute Malcolm X from the historical standpoint (for that see “Bad Rap for Malcolm X,” by Carol lannone, NR, Dec. 14).

Even so, having read some of the printed matter that has recently been gushing forth on the subject, I can safely say that although Lee has not turned out a hagiography, neither has he gone into the particularly spiky aspects of Malcolm’s history: his negotiations on behalf of Elijah Muhammad with the KKK, his excursions into homosexuality and male hustling, and the NoI’s anti-Semitism, which he espoused. But even without those elements, and the alleged burning down of his own house for propaganda purposes, Malcolm X leaves room enough for the filmmaker to cover all kinds of ground, from rough to smooth to tragic: from Malcolm Little, the preacher’s son in Omaha, whose father is allegedly murdered by whites and whose mother goes mad, to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, the independent black leader gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom less than a year after his eye-opening pilgrimage to Mecca.

JS

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John Simon

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INTO his short life, Malcolm X (1925-1965) packed many careers, from criminal to ascetic; and many ideologies, from extremist white-hating black nationalism to some sort of incipient tolerance and ecumenism. I know no more about the Black Muslim orator and organizer than anyone would who lived in New York City during the first lustrum of the Sixties, when Malcolm X’s rise within the Nation of Islam, expulsion, and murder made headlines, and I am not especially qualified to assess the value of Spike Lee’s three-hour-and-twenty-one-minute Malcolm X from the historical standpoint (for that see “Bad Rap for Malcolm X,” by Carol lannone, NR, Dec. 14).

Even so, having read some of the printed matter that has recently been gushing forth on the subject, I can safely say that although Lee has not turned out a hagiography, neither has he gone into the particularly spiky aspects of Malcolm’s history: his negotiations on behalf of Elijah Muhammad with the KKK, his excursions into homosexuality and male hustling, and the NoI’s anti-Semitism, which he espoused. But even without those elements, and the alleged burning down of his own house for propaganda purposes, Malcolm X leaves room enough for the filmmaker to cover all kinds of ground, from rough to smooth to tragic: from Malcolm Little, the preacher’s son in Omaha, whose father is allegedly murdered by whites and whose mother goes mad, to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, the independent black leader gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom less than a year after his eye-opening pilgrimage to Mecca.