Historical Primer

By JAY COCKS

MALCOLM X

Produced by ARNOLD PERL and MARVIN WORTH

This biography of Malcolm X, the implacable crusader for black dignity, is presented under the auspices of Warner Bros. The prominently billed participation of Malcolm's widow, Betty Shabazz, is reassuring, but for Warner Bros, to make a documentary about Malcolm X seems about as likely as for the D.A.R. to sponsor the Peking Ballet. That the film should come from such a source is the first surprise. The second is that it is good--a fair forum for Malcolm's fundamental ideas and an exceptional visual chronicle of how those ideas took shape.

The early part of Malcolm's life--his boyhood in Lansing, Mich., his youth in Harlem pushing and pimping, his seven years in prison--is told in excellent, highly evocative stock footage, accompanied by passages from Malcolm's autobiography quietly and effectively read by James Earl Jones.

The most fascinating part of the film, however, shows Malcolm's development from star preacher for Elijah Muhammad to independent political figure. The transformation is told in newsreel footage that still holds the power to singe the conscience. We see Malcolm on street corners, fervently laying down the Black Muslim gospel of mumbo-jumbo racism, castigating the "palefaces" and "white devils" and attracting the angriest, most disaffected of blacks with his unyielding insistence on racial pride. Then we watch a rift develop between Malcolm and Elijah, a break that began with Malcolm as part of his political growth.

In several charming touristy scenes that look as if they were taken from his widow's home movies, we are shown Malcolm on his 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca, a trip that would cause him to revise his feelings about separatism and the supposed inherent evil of white people. Now Malcolm, having entirely broken with Elijah, maintained that "there are only good and bad human beings." Soon after, at age 39, he would die in a Harlem mosque, the victim of assassination.

The documentary assigns no blame for the slaying, although it suggests that the Black Muslims, furious over Malcolm's turn against them and threatened by it, were somehow responsible. But at the time most blacks were reluctant to blame the Muslims. James Farmer talks angrily about Malcolm's approaching the State Department with some sort of special information--the implication being that Malcolm was killed because he knew too much, though by whom or about what is never stated.

On the streets of Harlem, in anguished interviews filmed right after Malcolm's death, it was Whitey who was held responsible, in some way, in any way. No one was ready to believe that a prophet might have been killed by his own people.

--Jay Cocks

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