POWER TO THE PEEPHOLE

By RICHARD CORLISS

How did Oliver Stone let this one get away? A gang of '60s rebels, an aura of righteous violence, the charge that fbi boss J. Edgar Hoover and the Mafia flooded America's cities with cheap drugs-why, it's all so lurid, it must be true. And if it's not, it can still be a movie.

Panther, the new film directed by Mario Van Peebles (New Jack City) from a screenplay by his father Melvin (Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song), is indeed a movie: an earnest, naive, fitfully engrossing film with urgent performances and a final plot twist that stretches credulity to the snapping point. But because the subject is the Black Panther Party for Self Defense-the notorious cadre of black radicals that incited and attracted much of the '60s edgiest violence-Panther is more than a movie. It's the cause of raucous dispute, a chance for opening and licking old wounds about the party, an excuse for debating both the sorry condition of today's urban blacks and the responsibility, if any, of filmmakers to get the facts straight.

A committee of black entertainers and athletes, including Danny Glover, Spike Lee and Magic Johnson, took out ads in Daily Variety to support Van Peebles pere et fils: "We laud their efforts and their courage for making a movie that sends a message of strength, dignity and empowerment to the African American community -- especially to our youth." This was in response to an earlier ad, declaring Panther "a two-hour lie," that was placed in Daily Variety by David Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a neoconservative outfit in Los Angeles. Horowitz, a reformed leftie who worked for the Panthers in the '70s, now believes that "the overwhelming impact of the Panthers was negative." And he fears Panther will have a toxic effect: "I fully expect that there will be people who will die because of this film."

Mario Van Peebles demurs: "The kids don't see this movie as a call to arms but as a call to consciousness." In this Molotov cocktail of fact and fancy, the party's founders, Huey Newton (Marcus Chong) and Bobby Seale (Courtney B. Vance), are two streetwise dreamers from Oakland, California, who live their slogan: "Power to the People." They arm themselves and talk instructive trash to the pig cops-but within the letter of the law. They also serve food to kids and educate them in Afro awareness.

In real life, the free lunches came at a hefty price. The early Panthers -- who took their rhetorical cues from that noted protector of civil liberties, Chairman Mao -- were a confused blend of boys' club and militia. Their gun battles with police were macho street theater run amuck. And their thug posture, as later adopted by drug gangs and rap artists, further isolated the black male from the American mainstream. In the film, though, iconography tells the story. The Panthers are young and handsome; virtually all whites are old and fat, decadent crypt keepers of a corrupt culture.

The film's main new charge is that with the Mafia's connivance, Hoover sent the Black Revolution a toxic sedative: cheap dope. And it worked too well, enslaving whites as well as blacks. As Panther notes, America has 10 times as many drug addicts now as it did in the '60s. The notion of the fbi's fomenting a domestic opium war is piquant-but preposterous. And what if it's true? Are we to blame aboriginal Americans for introducing tobacco to the Europeans?

The filmmakers stress that Panther is fiction; some of those who were there see it as flawed fact. "In part, Mario and his father have done a very good job of showing our history," says David Hilliard, former Panther chief of staff. "But the characterization of Bobby Seale being dominant over Huey Newton is certainly a reversal of history. Unfortunately, most of the people in the party leadership who could have helped are on my project." Hilliard, you see, is working with Seale on their own film for Warner Bros. These days Panther adversaries don't have shootouts, they have rival development deals with movie studios.

It's one more proof that sooner or later, in America everything is show biz-fodder for the great infotainment maw of gossip, nostalgia and exploitation. An ad for the movie's sound track announces: "The Panthers had a calling. Now, so do you. Call 1-800-8-panther to win $1,000 instantly in the Panther 'Power to the People' Sweepstakes." As for Horowitz, his potent grievances have been so well publicized that Mario Van Peebles grouses, "He must have a bigger promotion budget than our film does."

As Melvin Van Peebles advises, "The movie is a Rorschach test. Your perception of the past completely colors the way the movie strikes you." No doubt. But in offering the Panthers as idealists and objects of veneration to today's youth, the movie surely stands guilty of criminal naiveta. What's the politically correct term for whitewash? --Reported by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York