Malcolm X (Largo International N.V., JVC Entertainment Networks, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, Warner Bros., 1992)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, April 30) at 5 I watched the Turner Classic Movies showing of Spike Lee’s 1992 biopic Malcolm X as part of TCM’s month-long salute to Warner Bros., part of the same conglomerate, on the studio’s 100th anniversary. That ate up their regular schedule right after I’d patiently waited for Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” and Jacqueline Stewart’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” to come back after their month-long hiatii for the “31 Days of Oscar” commemoration in March. Fortunately, Malcolm X turned out to be a masterpiece, a triumph for Lee, his co-writer Arnold Perl, and Denzel Washington, who played the title character. It helped Lee and Perl that Malcolm X’s life fit neatly into the three-act structure of classic screenwriting. In Act I he was “Red” Little, small-time gangster wanna-be, numbers runner and sometime pimp; in Act II he was Malcolm X, faithful servant of the Nation of Islam and its quirky founder, whom Malcolm always referred to as “The Honorable Elijah Muhammad” until he learned that he had fathered children out of wedlock with at least two different women and was therefore not quite as “honorable” as he’d self-advertised; and Act III was when Malcolm departed the Nation of Islam, went on the hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca all faithful Muslims are supposed to go on at least once in their lives if they can afford it), met Muslims of all races and colors, adopted the name “El-Hajj Malik Al-Shabazz” and started the Organization of Afro-American Unity to file an official complaint with the United Nations about the treatment of Black people in the United States. Alas, Act III was cut tragically short when Malcolm X was murdered at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on February 21, 1965 as he was about to give a speech on his plans for the new organization.

Just who killed him and why remain matters of historical debate; the standard explanation was that Malcolm’s murder was a “hit” ordered by Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam as a way of silencing a former disciple who’d become an apostate, and a quite effective apostate at that. The actual assassins were Black, but the Lee-Perl script has Malcolm telling his wife, Betty Shabazz (Angela Bassett, a year before her breakout role as Tina Turner in What’s Love Got to Do With It?), that he knows what the Fruit of Islam, the armed security force of the Nation of Islam, can do because he trained them, and the harassment they’re experiencing goes far beyond what the Fruit of Islam could do. In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, co-written with Alex Haley (who was sufficiently inspired by Malcolm’s search for his African heritage that his next book was Roots, about his own search for his true origins), Malcolm made the chillingly accurate prediction that the white power structure would kill both him and his principal rival as leader of the African-American community, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Autobiography of Malcolm X also contains a fascinating story of how Malcolm became disillusioned with the Nation of Islam that isn’t in the movie (unfortunately). Malcolm wrote that it started with a lunch date he had with a member of the U.N. delegation from one of the Arab states (he didn’t say which one) during which he outlined the theology of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam. The Arab diplomat kept shaking his head throughout the meal and finally told Malcolm, “That has nothing to do with the Islam I believe in.” That started Malcolm thinking that if he really was serious about being a Muslim, then he should investigate and find out more about a religion he professed to believe in.

The film is beautifully told and the acting is amazing throughout; in addition to Washington (who really didn’t look that much like the real Malcolm; ironically, Malcolm’s skin was much lighter than Washington’s and he had red hair, which in his pre-Nation of Islam days Malcolm regularly had “conked,” a then-fashionable way of applying lye to the scalp to supposedly make your hair straight; you had to rinse it out before it burned and one of the best scenes in the film is one in which two Boston police officers come to arrest Malcolm for robbery just as he’s rinsing his head in the toilet because all the other plumbing in his apartment has suddenly literally dried up), and Bassett, there’s Al Freeman, Jr. as Elijah Muhammad, Albert Hall as Baines (a composite character who, in the film, meets Malcolm in prison, recruits him for the Nation of Islam and ultimately is part of the goon squad that kills him), Delroy Lindo as “West Indian Archie,” Malcolm’s mentor in the thug life he leads in Act I, and Lonette McKee unforgettable as Malcolm’s mother, Louise Little. The film’s version of Malcolm’s origins stresses his roots in Black separatist movements – his father, Earl Little (Tommy Hollis), was ostensibly a Baptist minister but really preached the line of Marcus Garvey, a 1920’s Black leader who advocated that American Blacks should move en masse to Africa, where they could live among people who looked like them and fulfill the destiny of the Black race. (Garvey was secretly funded by the Ku Klux Klan because he shared their hatred of interracial marriage.) Alas, when Earl is murdered by the Klan, Louise’s kids are taken away from her and parceled out to various foster families; Malcolm is put in a boarding school where he excels academically, but his ambition to be a lawyer is mocked by a racist white teacher who tells him to be a carpenter instead.

Ultimately Malcolm moves to Harlem (represented by a record Ella Fitzgerald made with Duke Ellington in the 1950’s of Duke’s 1933 song “Drop Me Off in Harlem,” in which Ellington and his lyricist, Ned Kenny, made fun of the racist conceit of so many other songs of the period that Black people missed the South and the sharecropper and servant jobs they had worked there) and then to Boston, where he lives a thug’s life until he plots a robbery of an elderly white Gay man whom people in Malcolm’s entourage had allowed to bathe him and apply talcum powder to for money. (This has become one of the most controversial parts of Malcolm’s life, as his homophobic detractors in the Black community have alleged that Malcolm actually had sex with this man as a male prostitute.) Lee’s staging of the robbery is one of the most effective scenes in the film: the white victim sleeps so soundly through the entire crime that Malcolm is even able to steal a valuable ring off his finger without waking him up. In prison, under Baines’s tutelage, Malcolm is able to hone his intellect and reform himself, and he also adopts the Muslim religion after a scene in which he confronts the prison chaplain and asks what color Jesus was.

The scenes of Malcolm in the Nation are among the oddest and creepiest moments of the film – the historically accurate but outrageously sexist banner at the Nation’s convention, “We Must Protect Our Most Valuable Property, Our Women,” itself defines the movement – and in the film’s account of Malcolm’s disillusion with the Nation of Islam he reads the stories in white mainstream newspapers about Elijah Muhammad’s sexual shenanigans. He confronts Elijah directly and Elijah’s excuse is that he needs to propagate his seed as widely as possible to ensure the survival of the movement. This doesn’t sound all that different from why Joseph Smith said the Mormons should have multiple wives – which begs the question of why Elijah Muhammad didn’t change the theology of the Nation of Islam to allow polygamy, especially since the Arab culture that gave birth to Islam in the first place allowed men to marry as many women as they could support financially. Maybe it was because Joseph Smith had literally got lynched for promoting what he called “plural marriage.” I could say a lot more about Malcolm X, but it remains what I thought it was when I first saw it in 1992, at a Saturday morning screening at which young Black activists were running a merch table with cassettes of Malcolm’s speeches, and even though more time has elapsed between its initial release and now (over 30 years) than did between Malcolm X’s assassination and its initial release (not quite 28 years), it’s a masterpiece and a chilling reminder of how relevant the issues Malcolm X raised still are. Early in the film, when Malcolm X is saying that even if Blacks play by the rules and win power the way you’re supposed to, the white power structure won’t let them do anything, he could have been talking about the recent expulsion of young Black activists Justin Jones and Justin Pearson from the Tennessee state legislature.