Malcolm X: In Print, on Screen

Thomas Doherty
Biography, Volume 23, Number 1, Winter 2000, pp. 29-48 (Article)
Published by University of Hawai'i Press
DOI: 10.1353/bio.1999.0011
For additional information about this article
Access Provided by Maseno University. Library at 09/19/11 11:21AM GMT
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bio/summary/v023/23.1doherty.html
Biography 23.1 (Winter 2000) Biographical Research Center
MALCOLM X: IN PRINT, ON SCREEN
THOMAS DOHERTY
In a rare motion picture memory related in The Autobiography of Malcolm
X, the author sits in a Michigan theater watching Gone with the Wind
(1939). When Butterfly McQueen went into her act, he recalls bitterly,
I felt like crawling under the rug (32). For the young Malcolm Little, as
for black Americans everywhere, the classical Hollywood screen was an
inventory of negative stereotypes and a 35mm projection of white power.
When the mature man came to tell his own story, he naturally turned away
from the moving image and toward the written word. Appropriately then,
until lately, Malcolm X has been remembered most vividly through the
remarkable memoir written with the assistance of Alex Haley, his
posthumous stature due preeminently to what has for years been the most
popular autobiography of an African American in print. The Autobiography
of Malcolm Xnot documentaries or recordings of Malcolms speeches
preserved and assured Malcolms legacy after his murder at the Audubon
Ballroom on February 21, 1965.
In 1992, however, the Malcolm X of the printed page ceded pride of
place, at least temporarily, to the Malcolm X of the motion picture screen.
After languishing for over two decades in development hell, Malcolm X,
a $40 million Hollywood biopic, was released amid a torrent of hype,
expectation, and skepticism. Director Spike Lee, then and now Americas
most ambitious and controversial African American filmmaker, billed the
film as part labor of love, part declaration of conscience, and every frame
his own creation. Though based on the Autobiography and cowritten by
screenwriter Arnold Perl, Lee asserted his auteurist primacy over rival inter-
preters of the life of Malcolm X, whether Perl, Alex Haley, or Malcolm
himself. Malcolm X is my artistic vision, Lee proclaimed, The film is my
interpretation of the man. It is nobody elses (xiiixiv).
From the outset, Lee conceived of Malcolm X not just as a memorial to
a man who had become a demi-god to many African Americans, but as a
30 Biography 23.1 (Winter 2000)
rebuke to the kind of Hollywood condescension that had so embarrassed
and enraged Malcolm Little and generations of African American movie-
goers. But if Lees Malcolm X challenged the Hollywood tradition, it also
threatened the status of the Autobiography. In the age of the moving image,
after all, what is seen on the screen tends to erase what is read on the page.
Tellingly, however, the media face-off between the two images of Malcolm
Xthe literary creation and the motion picture versionindicates that
even in an incessantly visual culture, a portrait in literature can outlive a
depiction in film.
Published in November 1965, The Autobiography of Malcolm X has
been perennially popular, selling millions of copies in paperback in the U.S.
alone. At once a political tract, a religious conversion narrative, and an
underground commentary on twentieth-century American culture, it has
entered the restricted canon of American literary classics. Moreover, the
Autobiography is one of the few multicultural additions to undergraduate
reading lists that has not inspired the usual carping about lower admissions
standards for affirmative action entries. Whether as a work of literary merit
or cultural historical insight, its virtues have been self-evident.
Equally self-evident is the role the Autobiography has played in cement-
ing the extraordinary prestige of Malcolm X since his death. Though today
Malcolm X is paired in fame and influence with the Reverend Martin
Luther King, Jr.just as Spike Lee paired them in the end credit crawls to
his breakthrough film, Do the Right Thing (1989)
1
he ranked as a subor-
dinate, even fringe character in 1965, known mainly as a specter haunting
white America, and hardly more popular within the elite ranks of the black
civil rights leadership. His list of accomplishments in legislation is nil, his
message as a religious prophet is unheeded, and his one undeniable contri-
bution as a builder of institutions served to benefit the group that engi-
neered his assassination. Malcolm Xs legacy lies in who he was and what
he wrote, a presentation of self crafted in literature. In 1993, when The
Autobiography of Malcolm X returned to the New York Times paperback
best-seller list on the wave of publicity for the film, the scholar Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. defined the difference between Malcolm X and his peers. More
than Martin Luther King Jr., more than any of the black nationalists or the
neo-Marxists, Malcolm X was a writer, a wordsmith (11).
2
Of course, like Malcolm X, the Autobiography has never been free of
controversy. Criticism swirls around two familiar problem points with the
genre of autobiography: the question of authorship and of fidelity to histo-
ry. The precise nature of the creative collaboration between Malcolm X and
Alex Haley awaits full examination of the original manuscript, auctioned
off by the Haley estate in 1992, but reportedly awash in marginal notations
Doherty, Malcolm X 31
in red pencil from Malcolm over syntax, word choice, factual details, and
narrative ordering.
3
Yet, however the credit is finally parceled out between
subject and amanuensis, the work is manifestly more in tune with Mal-
colms voice and vision, more an authentic expression of the man, than
most as told to or ghosted memoirs, such as Tina Turners I, Tina: My
Life Story (1987), written with Kurt Loder, or Colin Powells My American
Journey (1995), written with Joseph E. Persico.
Questions about the work as a truthful account of Malcolm Xs life are
less easily shunted aside. By the measure of autobiography, the most noto-
riously untrustworthy of genres, The Autobiography of Malcolm X is no less
a work of hindsighted reconstruction, strategic omission, and outright fab-
rication than, say, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. By the measure
of the slave narratives of the nineteenth century, however, works whose ver-
ifiable authenticity was yoked to their political purpose and moral mean-
ing, the Autobiography is more troubling. This is why the duplicities alleged
in Bruce Perrys revisionist Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black
America, published in 1991, have cut so deeply. For personal and political
reasons [Malcolms] public image was carefully constructed, Perry con-
tends: Its exaggerated portrayal of his youthful criminality enhanced his
tough image and characterized the transformation of the pseudo-mascu-
line, criminal Malcolm into the manly, political Malcolm (ix). Perry mar-
shals evidence that contradicts Malcolms account of his fathers death, his
criminal past, and most damningly, the firebombing of his house in 1965.
(Just as the Nation of Islam charged, Perry implies it was an act of arson
committed by Malcolm himself.) Less seriously, Perry reports that despite
Malcolms reported chagrin during Gone with the Wind, he was addicted
to the movies as a young man, viewing as many as five a day. Malcolm
Little not only loved the Hollywood tough guys, but enjoyed the all-
black musicals Stormy Weather (1943) and Cabin in the Sky (1943) (72).
Whatever the outcome of scholarly debates over authorship and histor-
ical assaults on the integrity of the narrator, it seems unlikely to detract
from the popularity of the tale. No wonder: The Autobiography of Malcolm
X tells a traditional American story with direct links to at least three vener-
able literary genres. Like Benjamin Franklin, Malcolm X is, in John
Caweltis phrase, an apostle of the self-made man. Like Frederick Douglass,
Malcolm journeys from slavery to freedom in a kind of twentieth-century
slave narrative. Like Puritan fathers from Jonathan Edwards to Tom Doo-
ley, he experiences a Damascus-like moment of conversion, and dedicates
himself to missionary work among the infidels. Linking all three tropes is
the theme of literacy, an almost religious reverence for the redemptive
power of the printed word as the path to salvation and self-transformation.
As with the antebellum slave narrative, the formal strengths and inci-
sive insights of the Autobiography give the lie to racist ideology. Mirabile
dictuthe black man can think, write, and analyze. Yet the work defied
another image, a new African American stereotype that Malcolm himself
helped forge. The stance of the literary Malcolm refuted the hot television
image of the angry demagogue showcased in documentaries such as
WNTAs The Hate That Hate Produced (1959) and ABCs Walk in My
Shoes (1961).
4
Significantly, Malcolm Xs arrival on the national scene was
concurrent not only with the renascent civil rights movement, but with a
series of pivotal shifts in the nature of television journalism: the consolida-
tion of three-network hegemony in the late 1950s, the extension of night-
ly newscasts from fifteen minutes to thirty minutes in September 1963, and
the high renaissance of the prime time television documentary. Telegenic
and quick witted, Malcolm courted the networks like a smitten suitor, and
relished his verbal duels with patrician white broadcasters. As the critic
Shelby Steele noted, Malcolm X spoke in sound bites before the term was
invented, and used blunt street talk to punch through the fog of pretense,
politeness, and euphemism on television.
For many Americans the first look at Malcolm X on screen came in the
five-part series on the Nation of Islam entitled The Hate That Hate
Produced, a production of New York station WNTAs Newsbeat program
hosted by Mike Wallace. Billed as a study of black racism, and focusing
on a Negro religious group who call themselves the Muslims, the series
was originally telecast over the week of July 1317, 1959, but it caused so
much stir that an edited overview was broadcast on July 22, 1959, with a
post-screening discussion featuring less threatening black leaders such as
Jackie Robinson and Roy Wilkens.
5
Though Wallace assures viewers that
sober minded Negroes reject the black racism of the Negro dis-
senters, he cautions, let no one underestimate the Muslims.
After some exposition on the Nation of Islam and film clips of Elijah
Mohammed, the program zeroes in on the colorful figure naturally of
more interest to New Yorkers, Minister Malcolm X. He is a remarkable
man, admits Wallace, tracking a spiritual trajectory that the Autobiography
would later flesh out:
A man who by his own admission was once a procurer and dope peddler. He
served time for robbery in the Michigan and Massachusetts state penitentiaries.
But now he is a changed man. He will not smoke or drink. He will not even eat
in a restaurant that houses a tap. He told Newsbeat that his life changed for him
when the Muslim faith taught him no longer to be ashamed of being a black
man.
32 Biography 23.1 (Winter 2000)
Doherty, Malcolm X 33
Interviewed onscreen by the African American journalist and writer Louis
E. Lomax, Malcolm comes across as assured and animated. He calmly lays
down the Nation of Islam line, reinterpreting the Book of Genesis to fin-
ger the white man as the snake in the Garden of Eden. Though placed
alongside other black leaders (Elijah Mohammed, John Davis, and Adam
Clayton Powell), Malcolm warrants the lengthiest biographical sketch.
Toward the close of the program, Wallace again reminds viewers of
Malcolms dope peddler/procurer/convict past, perhaps to plant the idea
that his role of minister is less a new life than a new con. By contrast,
Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, with his finger on the pulse of the
Harlem vox populi, calls Malcolm a very brilliant man. Wallace laments
the success of the Black Muslims as tragic irrefutable evidence that many
Negroes are losing faith in the American dream, and consider them-
selves Americans of African descent. Exhibit A is a sequence showing
Malcolm at the pulpit, electrifying a congregation of once sober-minded
Negroes at Powells Harlem church.
It was the angry black man on the television screen that Malcolms
postmortem Autobiography forced Americans to see anew. The physical fea-
ture Malcolm fixated on in his most famous characterization of the oppo-
sitionthe blue-eyed devilspinpoints the site of contention. For
Malcolm, the eyes reflected the white mans perceptible failures of vision,
eyes that saw him but did not perceive him, an intimation linking the
Autobiography to that other great literary expression of African American
culture in the postwar era, Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man. First presented on
television, next represented in print, and finally projected on the motion
picture screen, the popular image of Malcolm X has developed in three
stages of multiple exposure: the televisual face transmitted on the small
screen, the literary self conjured by the autobiography, and the motion pic-
ture incarnation fashioned by Spike Lee for the theatrical screen and video-
tape afterlife.
6
To be sure, prior to the release of Malcolm X, Malcolms dynamic
screen presence had remained before American eyes in archival documen-
taries on the civil rights movement, and in montages of assassinated leaders
from the 1960s. Most notably, Marvin Worth and Arnold Perls same-
titled Malcolm X (1972), a kind of documentary precursor to the Spike Lee
biopic, showcased Malcolms screen magnetism to an audience that may
have missed it the first time around. Though not widely distributed in its
dayVarietys bottom-line prediction proved accurate: commercial out-
look will be spotty (Malcolm X)and seldom seen today, the film
retrieved many of the best clips of Malcolm and thereby provided in later
years a convenient secondary source for news reports on Malcolms impact.
Worth and Perls Malcolm X opens cold, with a close-up of Malcolm
at the podium delivering his terse by any means necessary promise while
a protean rap tune (Niggers Are Scared of Revolution by the Last Poets)
is mixed over a montage of contemporary African American life. (Perhaps
another reason for the cold opening, without title credits, is that the names
of filmmakers Marvin Worth and Arnold Perl do not exactly bespeak
African roots.) Eschewing the standard Voice of God commentary, the
documentary is structured around passages from the Autobiography as read
by James Earl Jones: the death of Malcolms father, a childhood shadowed
by the Great Depression (a soft, lovely interlude unfolding to Billie Holi-
days God Bless the Child), a youth spent Lindy Hopping in Boston and
Harlem, and so on. One sequence is uniquely suited to cinematic elabora-
tion. When Malcolm X extols the value of an all-black education minus the
little black sambo, a montage of Hollywood stereotypes unfurlsbug-eyed
spooks, tongue-tied servants, and Stepin Fetchit himself. The ugly pageant
serves not only as visual history lesson, but as striking juxtaposition to the
vital screen presence at the center of the documentary that is Malcolm X.
Framed close up in big screen celluloid, whether in black and white or full
color, Malcolm radiates the charisma of a motion picture star of the first
magnitude.
As Malcolm X chronicles the growing fame of its subject, Malcolms life
increasingly becomes a self-conscious public performance. He falters only
once. Besieged by squadrons of journalists with sharp questions and open
microphones, he makes a glib remark that stops his forward momentum
when another series of archival images intrudesthe funeral cortege of
John F. Kennedy. Malcolms infamous wisecrack that the presidents mur-
der was a case of the chickens coming home to roost led to his discipli-
nary silencing for ninety days by Elijah Mohammed, and in time, to
Malcolms permanent estrangement from the Nation of Islam. Even so, his
sparring with reporters tends to be good natured and high spirited, with
each side enjoying the battle of wits. Making his first public statement after
his ninety-day silencing, he jokes to an interviewer that if he is talking too
fast it is because he has been silent for so long.
In a resonant shift of scene, the urban, American interiors of Malcolm
X are replaced by the desert landscapes of the Middle East. Malcolms trip
to Mecca inspires a stunning spiritual transformation. We are truly the
same, Malcolm states flatly, acknowledging that many white people are fed
up with the treatment of the black man. To his former critic Mike Wallace,
he asserts, I never did hate. Most ominously, he assails Elijah Mohammed
and reveals the reason for his break with the Nation of Islam: that Elijah
Mohammed has fathered illegitimate children with teenage girls.
34 Biography 23.1 (Winter 2000)
Doherty, Malcolm X 35
The preordained climax to the documentary is no less shocking for
being expected. In the aftermath of Malcolms bloody assassination,
reporters badger Betty Shabazz, still in a state of shock. Carefully worded
responses are delivered by Elijah Mohammed (Malcolm was a victim of
his own preaching) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (an unfortunate
tragedy). A series of interviews with the people of Harlem better reflects
the esteem from the street and the prevailing sentiment of the black com-
munity that Malcolms death was orchestrated by, or committed with the
connivance of, the New York Police Department and the FBI.
After Worth and Perls Malcolm X, twenty years passed before motion
pictures of Malcolm X again filled the theatrical screen. The release of Lees
Malcolm X on November 18, 1992, was a tribute to the tenacity of two
men: Marvin Worth, the producer of the 1972 documentary, who had been
pitching the project around Hollywood since 1966, and Spike Lee, who
made it his personal business after hearing that the white, Jewish Canadian
filmmaker Norman Jewison was in line to direct the biopic of the black,
Muslim African American. How much of the long gestation can be attrib-
uted to Hollywood racism, how much to the usual difficulties in putting
together a decent script and a salable package, is hard to determine, but not
until Malcolms stature reached a kind of critical mass in American no less
than African American culture could the project have been green-lighted.
Its been a long journey getting to this point, Worth commented upon
the films release, sounding more weary than victorious, Its rewarding to
finally be making a film about [Malcolms] life.
7
Lees travails in bringing Malcolm X to the screen are chronicled in his
tie-in book, By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the
Making of Malcolm X. The static, the resistance came from everywhere,
Lee claimed: Presently in America a war is being fought. Forget about
guns, planes, and bombs, the weapons from now on will be the newspapers,
magazines, TV shows, radio, and FILM (xiii, xiv). The all-capital high-
lighting of the motion picture medium underscores the strange omission of
the source material: the book entitled The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
When his story finally did become a major motion picture, the grainy
Malcolm of archival memory and the Malcolm of the Autobiography sur-
rendered media dominance to an eclectic array of new visual representa-
tions: not just Malcolm X the movie, but Malcolm X the product. A flood
of saturation imagery and ancillary marketing items swept in with the film,
including X-marked caps, shirts, jackets, posters, coffee cups, and air fresh-
eners.
8
Malcolms rebirth as pop icon was a curious makeover for a self-
described man of letters whose affinities were so emphatically print-based,
whose faith in the transforming power of literacy was almost mystical.
In the films title no less than in the mans surname, Malcolms X
retained its almost talismanic force as an alphabetic sign with multiple
significance. X is the mark of the illiterate, the mark of negation, and the
mark of the condemned film. For director Lee and African American film
buffs, the obliterating X logo, a negation with a positive value, also spot-
lights a precise cinematic referent. Typographically, the mark conjures the
publicity tagline for Melvin Van Peebless seminal blaxploitation picture,
Sweet Sweetbacks Baadasssss Song (1971): Rated X by an all white jury!
Finally, the X provided the brandname signage for the films newspaper
advertising and one-sheet posters. Crisscrossed between the upper arms of
the X, a litany of identities labeled this most malleable of American self-
made men: Scholar, Convict, Leader, Disciple, Hipster, Father, Hustler,
Minister, Black Man, Every Man.
Not even that list exhausted the models coloring the cinematic back-
story, however. Just as The Autobiography of Malcolm X was read by the
light of classic American literature, Malcolm X unspooled in the shadow of
one of Hollywoods most durable motion picture genres: the biopic.
During the classical studio era, the biopic thrived by celebrating the great
(white) men of science, politics, and the arts, and the loyal women who
stood behind them. While adhering to the rigorous codes of the Hays
36 Biography 23.1 (Winter 2000)
The Iconic X: In the wake of Spike Lees biopic, a political cartoon
comments on the ubiquity of the brandname signage. (Cartoon cour-
tesy of Kevin Spiers, The Charlotte Observer 1993).
Permission has
been denied to use
this image online
Doherty, Malcolm X 37
Office, screenwriters discovered wellsprings of romantic yearnings and ded-
icated altruism in the lives of loveless inventors and narcissistic writers.
Well-known anecdotes of the great mans lifeAlexander Graham Bell
reaching out to touch Watson, young Tom Edison getting his ears boxed,
Alvin York wetting his rifle sight at a turkey shootvalidated the authen-
ticity of the screen incarnation even as blemishes in the public image were
brushed over to fit commercial necessity and censorial oversight.
At their most fanciful, the bloated melodramas of Hollywoods classi-
cal era gave celluloid biography a bad name. Writ large for the big screen,
the grandiose biopics from Warner Bros. (The Story of Louis Pasteur [1936])
and The Life of Emile Zola [1937]) and MGM (Young Tom Edison [1940]
and Edison the Man [1940]) were canvases for breathless romance, extrava-
gant set design, and forward narrative thrust, not historical retrieval and
psychological insight. Moral lapses, character flaws, and unmentionable
proclivities were tactfully omitted from Hollywoods lives of the secular
saintshence the brilliant military strategist General George Armstrong
Custer in They Died with Their Boots On (1941), and the virile heterosex-
ual composer Cole Porter in Night and Day (1946).
Not until the mid-1950s did the biopic become more critical, intrusive,
and skeptical. Propelled by the popular dissemination of Freudian psychol-
ogy and the decline of Hays Office censorship, a new breed of biopic ex-
posed the lives of great men, warts and all: Vincent Van Goghs demonic
Lust for Life (1956), baseball player Jimmy Piersalls oedipal hitting slumps
in Fear Strikes Out (1957), and the founder of psychoanalysiss need for his
own treatment in Freud (1962).
9
From an African American perspective, however, the generic progress
of the biopic occurred in the motion picture equivalent of an all-white
neighborhood.
10
Where the Hollywood biopic tradition is varied and com-
plex, the specifically African American models are sparse and one-dimen-
sional. The few exceptions prove the rule: The Jackie Robinson Story (1950),
The Joe Louis Story (1953), and St. Louis Blues (1958), the story of W. C.
Handy, were all noteworthy products of a postwar atmosphere congenial to
civil rights, but though there was a Glenn Miller Story in 1955, and a Benny
Goodman Story in 1956, there was no Duke Ellington Story in 1957. In
crafting The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the writers Malcolm X and Alex
Haley might draw for inspiration on a rich literary tradition. In creating
Malcolm X, the filmmaker Spike Lee started virtually from scratch.
The Joe Louis Story, the biopic of another African American son of
Detroit, illustrates the restrictions operative in even the most well-inten-
tioned depictions of a black hero. Consigned to limited release due to its
African American subject matter, and the product of white filmmakers
(producer Stirling Silliphant, director Robert Gordon, and screenwriter
Robert Sylvester), the tale opens with newsreel footage of the lion in win-
ter: Louiss sorrowful swan song against Rocky Marciano, in an ill-advised
return to the ring, the once indomitable champion trading his cultural cap-
ital for a desperately needed payday. After Louiss defeat, a sympathetic
white reporter sits down at his typewriter to write the elegy for the great
fighter. It is the white reporters words and narrative voice-over that struc-
ture the spectators vantage on The Joe Louis Story. Denied a voice in his
own story, played clumsily by the astonishingly lookalike but manifestly
ineffectual novice actor Coley Wallace, Louis seems an empty vessel, a man
with no psychological motivation or interior intellectual life.
11
The matter
of raceeven the sobriquet Brown Bomberis handled so discreetly
that an inattentive viewer might never know that Joe Louis was black.
Passing mentions are made of the fact that a colored man has two
strikes against him in the fight game, and that he is a credit to the human
race, but even during the reenactments and authentic newsreel footage of
Louiss epochal fights with Max Schmeling, the extra-ring stakes in the
bout between the Nazi bermensch and the African American are barely
acknowledgedperhaps not to belabor the meaning of a sports event alive
in the memory of the 1953 audience, perhaps to avoid any uncomfortable
domestic comparisons. In the final seconds of The Joe Louis Story, as the
defeated champ walks into the urban night under the glow of the marquee
of Madison Square Garden, the white reporter, not the black protagonist,
gets the last word in voice-over: And from me, who knows him better than
most, I can see a beginning not an end. And from all of us tonight, Champ
good luck!
With that biopic background, Lees resolution to wrest the means of
production from Hollywood, to insist on the prerogatives of control and
final cut due an auteur, seems less an act of artistic temperament than cul-
tural self-determination. Due in no small part to Lees crafty and well-pub-
licized pose as an activist/auteur under siege from studio philistines,
Malcolm X attained the status of a high profile cultural event well before its
official release date. Even for a synergistic entertainment industry where
saturation marketing and full-throttle exploitation is normative behavior,
the publicity wraparound for Malcolm Xfrom CBS specials to MTV rock
blockswas relentless.
After so mammoth a buildup, the arrival of the film was met with a del-
uge of commentary in op-ed pages and news magazines. In the main, the
critical response to Malcolm X was quite favorable, ranging from wildly
38 Biography 23.1 (Winter 2000)
Doherty, Malcolm X 39
enthusiastic (Smashing. An event movie that lives up to the event!
blurbed Mike Clark in USA Today) to admiringly respectful (not exactly
the equal, or even the equivalent of the book, but it is an ambitious, tough,
seriously considered biographical film that, with honor, eludes easy charac-
terization, ruminated Vincent Canby in the New York Times ).
To adjudge Malcolm X fairly, with the benefit of some hindsight, and
without the fog of the hype of the moment, demands (at least) a studied
avoidance of the dreary gambit whereby the film version of an esteemed
book is inevitably deemed to be organically less satisfying in psychological
depth, symbolic texture, and thematic complexity than the print inspiration.
But even allowing that a film is an autonomous artwork to be taken on its
own, the backstory from The Autobiography of Malcolm X is so pervasive, its
narrative trajectory and signature scenes so well known, that Lees Malcolm
X assumes not only a familiarity with the predecessor text, but draws on it
for emotional ballast and narrative orientation. No less than the director,
the knowing spectator reads the film through the pages of the book.
Malcolm X begins with a blunt juxtaposition of elements that are at
once religious (Islamic/Jewish), racial (black/white), and economic (black
workers/white owners)though, for once, black economic and artistic
aspirations drown out the buzz of white corporate power. Even as the
Warner Bros. logo fills the screen, the voice of a Nation of Islam adherent
praises Elijah Mohammed and introduces Minister Malcolm X, whose
voice booms on the soundtrack with his trademark I charge the white
man litany of historical grievances. A huge American flag supplants the
Warner Bros. shield, like the opening of Patton (1970), dominating every
inch of screen space. The still image of the flag is intercut, and cut up, with
videotape images from the Rodney King beating of March 3, 1991, the
grainy camcorder recording looking blurry and otherworldly when blown
up to 35mm celluloid. Flames ignite around the edges of the flag, eating
away to the heart of the cloth, engulfing everything in tongues of fire except
a red, white, and blue, stars-and-striped X, defiantly ablaze.
The story proper opens with a leisurely crane shot swooping in on a
period recreation of Boston during the war years, a vibrant street scene
bathed in a mellow sepia-toned sunlit glowthe first glimpse of a recur-
rent chiaroscuro effect that might be termed high yellow lighting. The
establishing shot tracks on to the familiar figure of Spike Lee, playing
Malcolms sidekick Shorty, decked out in flamboyant zoot suit threads,
strutting down the street like a peacock, arms sashaying in tempo at his
side. Lee the director cuts away from Lee the actor to a barbershop interi-
or, where Malcolm (Denzel Washington) emerges to receive his first konk
job, an act of initiation into urban Negro-dom that is one of the great set
pieces from the Autobiography and the metaphor for Malcolms psycholog-
ical submission to the white world. Make it straight, he urges, willing to
trade the pain of the lye burning into his skull for a caucasian feature.
Looks white, dont it? he beams with satisfaction afterwards, looking at
his false image in the mirror.
Though the curtain raises on Malcolms young manhood in Boston,
the three act structure of the Autobiography determines the narrative trajec-
tory of the biopic, moving through Malcolms identities as street hustler,
Nation of Islam proselytizer, and independent, reborn preacher after his haj
to Mecca. Both the retrospective cast of Malcolm X and the offscreen shad-
ow of the Autobiography are emphasized by the first intrusion of an off-
screen voice-over from the reformed Malcolm, recalling his reprobate life.
Moments after the konk job sequence, a freeze frame locks Malcolms
image on screen, and the sober voice of Denzel Washington communicates
a sane, reflective sensibility that can come only from the mature man and
the pages of the Autobiography. This (offscreen) man is no longer the grin-
ning fool in the glad rags frozen in his false consciousness.
When my mother was pregnant with me, a party of Klansmen on horse-
back surrounded our house in Omaha, Nebraska, Washington/Malcolm
intones, cueing the first flashback, a visitation from white-robed nightriders
straight out of The Birth of a Nation (1915), though D. W. Griffiths heroes
are Spike Lees demons. Throughout Malcolm X, a contemporary crisis
triggers a flashback to the background that has warped the adult man. On
film, as in the mind of Malcolm, the American racist past is present.
As Malcolm confesses in his Autobiography, one legacy of that past is
the seductive allure of white women for the black man. In an eyeline match
from across the floor of the Roseland Ballroom, Malcolm fixes his gaze on
a backlit vision of the blonde Sophia (Kate Vernon), whose cream-colored
convertible and lily-white flesh make irresistible objects of cinematic attrac-
tion. The sexual politics of the two women in Malcolms life, the blonde
temptress Sophia and the black sister Betty (Angela Bassett), express the
most extreme of whore-virgin oppositions: Sophia is sexual, aggressive,
greedy, and vapid; Betty is chaste, quiet, caring, and aggressive only when
her family is threatened.
In Harlem, Malcolm hooks up with his mentor in crime, West Indian
Archie (Delroy Lindo), who teaches him how to dress, run numbers, and
snort cocaine. In both the Boston and Harlem passages of Malcolms unre-
generate life, Lee the director luxuriates in the high life of a big budget pres-
tige project from Hollywoodlavish production numbers, panoramic
crowd scenes, and precision recreations of period detail in set design, props,
40 Biography 23.1 (Winter 2000)
Doherty, Malcolm X 41
and wardrobes. The showstopping sequence is an elaborately choreo-
graphed dance number in the Roseland Ballroom. Swinging and Lindy
Hopping to a live Big Band, ecstatic dancers leap in line, all gyrating in per-
fect coordination, as in a vintage Hollywood musical. A tastefully chosen
soundtrack of period music sets the mood and comments on the action
the original tunes by the original performers, the kind of material whose
copyright permissions do not come cheap, among them Joe Turner, Billie
Holiday, Jackie Wilson, and the whitebread Perry Como. When West
Indian Archie and his goons come to kill Malcolm, ousting him from his
table while Billie Holiday performs Big Stuff, his last request is they leave
after Billie finishesand though he is hustled out before her song ends,
Holidays voice lingers on the soundtrack as Malcolm frantically flees from
his attackers.
After his brush with death, Malcolm hightails it back to Boston. In
another freeze-framed moment of retrospective clarity, Malcolm Xs voice-
over describes the creature he had become to support his drug habit, high
living, and white woman: I was an animal. During another konk job
again, a set piece from the Autobiographythe shutting off of the kitchen
faucets robs him of the water to douse the pain of the lye. Desperate,
Malcolm dunks his head in the toilet just as the police bust in: The jig is
up, says Shorty, calling down the curtain on the first act.
The auteur as actor: director Spike Lee under the gun as Malcolm Xs sidekick, Shorty
(From the Warner Bros. Press Kit for Malcolm X 1992 Warner Bros. Photo by David Lee.).
As in the Autobiography, physical imprisonment leads to spiritual liber-
ation. Brought to the words of Elijah Mohammed by the gentle ministra-
tions of the convict Baines (Albert Hall), Malcolm Little becomes Malcolm
X. In a duplicitous set up, Lee depicts Elijah Mohammed (Al Freeman, Jr.)
through Malcolms blissed out perspective. Suffused with a divine aura, the
Nation of Islam leader first appears as a God incarnate, materializing in a
golden chair in Malcolms cell, beaming wisdom and promising salvation.
Later, when Malcolm realizes that the slander from the white press about
Elijah Mohammeds philandering is all too true, even a spectator pre-
warned by the Autobiography may feel something of Malcolms disillusion-
ment in the man who was his savior. To the directors credit, and despite
the well-publicized fact that members of the Nation of Islam provided
security for the film during location shooting in New York City, Lee did
not whitewash the reputation of the leader.
For the final act, Lee milks the Hitchcockian suspense of anticipating
an event whose climax is known in advance. On the soundtrack Jackie
Wilsons A Change Is Gonna Come wafts over the action as Malcolm X
stoically prepares to meet his fate. An old black woman tells the distracted
man that Jesus will protect him, but he knows otherwise. Lee saves his
trademark vertiginous shot almost to the end. The stationary Malcolm X
stands center screen, pinned in the vortex of history, as the background
swirls woozily around him. Its a time for martyrs, he mutters to a com-
panion backstage at the Audubon Ballroom.
The murder sequence is fast and brutal. A staged scuffle distracts the
crowd, two shotgun blasts bring Malcolm down, and a fusillade of hand-
gun fire pumps into his prostrate body. In the chaos and confusion of the
aftermath, Lee jump cuts into a free-for-all frenzy of running and shouting
while Betty cries hysterically over her husbands slain figure. A fruitless
ambulance race to the hospital is followed by the blunt announcement
from a spokesman that Malcolm X is no more. Ironically, where the
depictions of Malcolms spiritual transformations and political declama-
tions tend to be static, the assassination sequence comes alive on screen.
Whether for reasons of political expediency or legal liability, Elijah
Mohammed is never personally implicated in the assassination. Instead, Lee
blames Malcolm Xs murder on a vague cadre of jealous ministers acting,
presumably, in collusion with white police powerperhaps the FBI, or the
CIA, or the NYPD. Theyre not working alonetheyre getting a lot of
help, Malcolm concludes before his death. The personification of the con-
spiracy theory is a white police captain played by Peter Boyle, an icon of
blue-collar bigotry since Joe (1970). After witnessing Malcolms power over
a huge crowd of street demonstrators, the captain says, Thats too much
power for one man to have. He reappears in the aftermath of the assassi-
nation and seems to scan the Audubon Ballroom with some satisfaction.
42 Biography 23.1 (Winter 2000)
Doherty, Malcolm X 43
Unwilling to turn up the lights with the hero lying dead on the stage,
Lee concludes Malcolm X with an extended tribute sequence. In voice-over,
the actor Ossie Davis recites his moving eulogy to Malcolm (Malcolm was
our manhood, our living black manhood), while newsreel images and still
photos show the real Malcolm X, smiling, vibrant, alive. On the soundtrack
a heavenly choir vocalizes soothingly.
Despite its undeniable power to move individual spectators, and for all
its laudable motives, Malcolm X came to be the kind of prestige project
more respected than enjoyed: a 201-minute hagiography that possessed all
too little of the energy, passion, or wit of the man who inspired it. Against
the fast pace, sharp asides, and direct trajectory of the Autobiography, the
motion picture meandered, straightfaced and dour. Where Malcolm and
Haley conjured the seductions of the unregenerate life with unrepentant
glee, Lees depiction of Malcolms Detroit Red years as a young hustler
in Boston and Harlem plays out as flat and joyless. The scenic backdrop to
sinmusic, dance, and fashionshould be congenial to the screen, but the
reckless, reprobate Malcolm idles in neutral, and the earnest, ascetic
Malcolm is often still and didactic. In this sense, the casting of Denzel
Washington may have worked against half of the performance. Though his
dignified bearing suited the portrayal of the converted Malcolm, the sober
actor is difficult to imagine as the unhinged hustler who gets high on coke
and bluffs his way through a game of Russian roulette. Not least, much of
the sly humor of the book was bleached out of the film. The exceptions are
welcome, if rare: Shortys wisecrack to the converted Malcolm that he
could never become a Muslim because he likes pigs feet and white women
too much, or the irreverent exchange between two FBI men wiretapping
the phone conversations between Malcolm and his wife, Betty Shabazz.
Compared to King, cracks one agent, this guys a monk.
A chaste match: Betty Shabazz (Angela Bassett) and Malcolm X (Denzel Washington
as the idealized Nation of Islam couple (From the Warner Bros. Press Kit for
Malcolm X 1992 Warner Bros. Photo by David Lee.)
Moreover, a major portion of the films running time is given over to
ritual reenactments, not just of passages read or depicted from the Auto-
biography, but of verbatim recitations of speeches, press conferences, and
letters. Again and again, images of the archival Malcolm X are restaged, ges-
ture for gesture, note for note, as if the director feels his biopic will be the
only record of the man to pass down to future generations, and that, in the
fullness of time, scholarly completion will be more salient than judicious
cutting. Sometimes splicing together color and black and white footage of
precisely the same scene, Lee shifts back and forth from dramatic to docu-
dramatic styles for visual variety, but no matter how dynamic the perform-
ance and the crowd enthusiasm, the ritual reenactments still play like hec-
toring from the screen. Given this extensive homage to the archival record,
a series of abrupt flash forwards to the historical present seems jarringly
incongruous: the Rodney King video at the top of the film, the appearance
of the Reverend Al Sharpton in a Harlem Street scene from the 1950s, and
Nelson Mandela speaking to a classroom in the closing coda. A film that
strives for historical verisimilitude by faithfully replicating period set design
and reenacting speeches line-for-line is ill-advised to shatter the narrative
illusion with a distancing device that thrusts the viewer out of the fiction
and into the present. The flamboyant figure of Al Sharpton, flourishing a
konk job that would shame Detroit Red, breaks the biopic frame with the
force of a real life Forrest Gump seamlessly matched into newsreel footage.
To be fair, Malcolms moments of enlightenment by way of prayer and
the printed word do not make promising source material for exciting screen
drama. Notwithstanding a tense scene where Malcolm and his fellow
inmate Baines search Websters Dictionary for the color-coded etymology
of the words black and white, the acts of reading and writing are,
almost by definition, cinematically inert. Finally, the films post-produc-
tion troubles are reflected in some technical flawsbadly lit and mis-
matched shotsthat are unusual in a big-budget Hollywood production.
Little wonder that despite critical esteem and a big opening week, the
films box office gross declined sharply in the second week, and ultimately
fell far short of the anticipated commercial pay off (in the six weeks fol-
lowing its opening, it grossed $45 million). According to a marketing post-
mortem by Warner Bros. executives, the daunting combination of the
films three-hour-plus running time and Lees severe message-mongering
doomed Malcolm X with audiences who resisted a tedious history lesson as
opposed to dramatic entertainment (Weinraub).
For his part, Lee was worried about more than box office returns.
Despite his name-above-the-title braggadocio, the director knew he would
44 Biography 23.1 (Winter 2000)
Doherty, Malcolm X 45
be answerable to rival claimants with a vested interest in the legacy of
Malcolm X. The biopic needed to remain true to the spirit of the book and
give due honor to the man, else alienate the target audience the director
sought most to cultivatehis fellow African Americans.
Whether from a failure of nerve or because Malcolm Xs version of
events accorded so perfectly with Lees own political and cinematic vision,
the director opted for a deferential fidelity to the Autobiography rather than
an independent inquiry into a contested life. Ironically for a self-styled
Hollywood iconoclast and outsider, Lee assumed a reverent stance harken-
ing back to the studio system biopics of the 1930s. In fact, the cycle of
biopics that began with the pious Gandhi (1982), and peaked with the
quartet from 19911992JFK, Malcolm X, Hoffa, and Chaplinregressed
back a generation to the worshipful spirit of Warner Bros. and MGM,
rather than to the wary skepticism of the biopics of the 1950s and 1960s.
In JFK, Jim Garrison is the lone crusader for truth in an ocean of corrup-
tion and conspiracy. In Hoffa, the labor boss is a fearless protector of the
working man and a fierce defender of civil liberties against bloated robber
barons and a sniveling Robert Kennedy. In Chaplin, the priapic tramp is a
transcendent genius who falls victim to Puritanism and McCarthyism.
Dignified bearing and historical detail: Denzel Washington in character as Malcolm X
(From the Warner Bros. Press Kit for Malcolm X 1992 Warner Bros. Photo by David Lee.)
Malcolm X is no less reverent and credulous. Following the script laid
out in the Autobiography, Lee portrays Malcolms first encounter with
racism as beginning while he is literally in his mothers womb, during the
nighttime assault by the Ku Klux Klan. The fire that is the central image of
the book finds apt expression in Lees own primary colors, the blue and yel-
low color scheme that is his visual signature. Firethe element that links
the Klans arson of Malcolms childhood home and the firebombing of his
own house days before his deathilluminates the arc of his life. The flames
symbolize too the threat that by any means necessary is the fire next time.
In the last moments of Malcolm X, Lee collapses distinctions between
drama and documentary by unspooling archival footage of the man just
dramatized in fiction. A valedictory montage intercuts clips of the real
Malcolm with a montage of black school children (Im Malcolm X! they
chirp in turn), and a cameo appearance from Nelson Mandela. Perhaps the
desperate blizzard of screen imagesvideo and film, real and reenacted
expresses the directors recognition that the motion picture medium has
fallen short of the mark, that the story of Malcolm X has, after all, been bet-
ter told by The Autobiography of Malcolm X than by the biopic Malcolm X.
NOTES
1. After the cathartic act of violence that climaxes Do the Right Thing, two statements fill
the screen. They read in part: Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates a bitterness
in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers (King). I am not against using vio-
lence in self-defense. I dont even call it violence when its self-defense. I call it intel-
ligence (Malcolm X).
2. In this context, an interesting generational face-off occurred on the political talk show
Inside Washington between Carl Rowan and Juan Williams in the wake of the release
of Lees Malcolm X. Rowan, an old-line civil rights leader who had little use for
Malcolm in the 1960s or since, testily noted that Malcolm was missing in action dur-
ing the crucial fights of the civil rights era. The younger reporter Williams accused
Rowan of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Rowan replied he was fighting for
civil rights when Williams was in diapers; Williams retorted that Rowan just didnt
understand what Malcolm meant to young black Americans.
3. The collaborative relationship between Malcolm X and Alex Haley is discussed in
Wideman. For the story of the original manuscript, see Text, and Alex Haley.
4. Although the imagery of Walk in My Shoes may evoke the gangster motif, Michael
Curtin argues that even a white viewer could begin to glimpse the validity of
Malcolms analysis (16970).
46 Biography 23.1 (Winter 2000)
Doherty, Malcolm X 47
5. Of the shocking and virulent anti-white movement, Variety observed that this
quarter, probably like so many others, never before was aware of the Black Muslims
(Tele Follow-Up). Among other attentive televiewers were agents of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, who filed extensive reports on the show back to headquarters
(see Carson 149, 15970).
6. Another stage in the moving image afterlife of Malcolm X includes the documentaries
released on home video in the wake of Lees Malcolm X, including Malcolm X: Make
It Plain (1993), Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993), and Brother Malcolm: The
Assassination of Malcolm X (1994).
7. Malcolm X Press Kit, Warner Bros, 1992. In 1966, Worth had acquired the motion
picture rights to the Autobiography from Betty Shabazz. Arnold Perl, a seasoned
Hollywood screenwriter whose varied career included adaptations of Yiddish theater,
and whose political activism had gotten him blacklisted during the McCarthy era,
wrote the screenplay. Ironically, he never lived to see Malcolm X produced in either
documentary or biopic form. He died in 1971 while the documentary Malcolm X was
still in production. He received a posthumous screenplay credit with Spike Lee on the
biopic Malcolm X.
8. Michael Eric Dyson discusses this process in Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning
of Malcolm X.
9. George F. Custen undertakes a complete survey of the genre in Bio/Pics: How Holly-
wood Constructed Public History.
10. Not until the late 1960s did Hollywood seriously begin to court African Americans,
a segment of the moviegoing audience that attends films out of all proportion to its
numbers. A 1967 banner headline in Variety trumpeted the news One Third Film
Public: Negro, and reported that film companies are gradually learning that black
power can mean green power. Although Negroes constitute only 15% of the U.S.
population, recent surveys indicate they represent nearly 30% of total patronage in
major city first run houses (Beaupre). Perhaps not coincidentally, the next week a
small item in the trade paper noted a forthcoming production on the life of the man
described as the former New York Black Muslim chief. This first step in a tortuous
path to production was a project being developed at Twentieth Century Fox, based
on an original screenplay by Louis E. Lomax from his book When the Word Is Given
(Lomax).
11. Oddly, although actor Coley Wallace gets full screen credit in the opening credits
(Introducing Coley Wallace), his name is absent from the screen credits in the end
credit reprise.
WORKS CITED
Alex Haley Literary Work Is Auctioned for $100,000. New York Times, Oct. 2, 1992:
A12.
Beaupre, Lee. One Third Film Public: Negro. Variety, Nov. 25, 1967: 3, 61.
Canby, Vincent. Malcolm X as Complex as Its Subject. New York Times, Nov. 18,
1992: C19.
Carson, Clayborne. Malcolm X: The FBI File. Ed. David Gallen. Intro. Spike Lee. New
York: Carroll and Graf, 1991.
Cawelti, John G. Apostles of the Self-Made Man. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965.
Curtin, Michael. Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics.
New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1995.
Custen, George F. Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History. New Brunswick:
Rutgers UP, 1992.
Do the Right Thing. Dir. Spike Lee. Prod. Spike Lee. Screenplay Spike Lee. Universal
Pictures, and 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 1989.
Dyson, Michael Eric. Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X. New York:
Oxford UP, 1995.
Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. Malcolm, the Aardvark, and Me. New York Times, Feb. 21,
1993: VII: 11.
Lee, Spike, with Ralph Wiley. By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of
Making Malcolm X. London: Vintage, 1993.
Lomax Insiding on X Biopic. Variety, Dec. 6, 1967: 5.
Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York:
Grove, 1965.
Malcolm X. Dir. Spike Lee. Prod. Marvin Worth and Spike Lee. Screenplay Arnold Perl
and Spike Lee. Warner Brothers, and 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 1993.
Malcolm X. Variety, May 24, 1972: 19.
Perry, Bruce. Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America. Barrytown, NY:
Station Hill, 1991.
Steele, Shelby. Malcolm Little. New Republic, Dec. 21, 1992: 2731.
Tele Follow-Up Comment: Mike Wallaces Newsbeat. Variety, July 15, 1959: 47.
Text Malcolm X Edited Found in Writers Estate. New York Times, Sept. 11, 1992:
C25.
Weinraub, Bernard. Hollywood Totals Up a Holiday Season of Mixed Blessings. New
York Times, Jan. 4, 1993: C11.
Wideman, John Edgar. The Art of Autobiography. Malcolm X: In Our Own Image. Ed.
Joe Wood. New York: St. Martins, 1992. 101116.
48 Biography 23.1 (Winter 2000)