The movie's first minutes promise the fire this time. A Patton-size U.S. flag fills the screen and is set ablaze. Video clips of Los Angeles cops pummeling a helpless Rodney King are underlaid with the words of Malcolm X fulminating against the white devil. Flames of black rage gnaw at the fabric of the flag until it is burned into a huge X. America, the image says, created Malcolm X in a centuries-old crucible of race hatred. And the legacy of Malcolm, murdered in 1965, helped define the battered field of today's Stars and Stripes.
Spike Lee is a logo maker of genius. It seems as if half the T shirts worn by American kids tout Lee's BUTTON YOUR FLY campaign for Levi's jeans, and half of the baseball caps carry the defiant initial X -- a clever device that raised consciousness of Malcolm and, not incidentally, advertised Lee's movie biography a year before its release.
Now the film arrives, in more than the usual storm of tumult and hype that attends the premiere of a Spike Lee Joint. Even before shooting began, Lee conferred with Black Muslim minister Louis Farrakhan, an early associate of Malcolm's who has vexed many with his antiwhite, anti-Jewish harangues. Lee also hired a Black Muslim security force as bodyguards on the set. He fought publicly with his distributor (Warner Bros.) and insurer (the Completion Bond Co.) when work on the overbudget film was suspended. Then he solicited and received gifts from black entertainers (Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey) to help him complete postproduction. He urged kids to skip school and see Malcolm X on its opening day. He discouraged white reporters from interviewing him about the film. Whatever rancorous agenda this served, it got the film's name in the papers. Lee is also a self-promoter of genius.
He is no filmmaker of genius. And yet you have to cherish, like a guilty conscience, any writer-director who can outrage so many people with a melodrama set in the ghetto tinderbox (Do the Right Thing), a musical about skin-tone prejudice among blacks (School Daze), an interracial love and lust story (Jungle Fever).
So the big surprise about Malcolm X is how ordinary it is. The film is a lavish, linear, way-too-long (3 hr. 21 min.) storybook of Malcolm's career, the movie equivalent of an authorized biography, a cautious primer for black pride. It is Lee's biggest film, and the least Spikey. At one point in producer Marvin Worth's 26-year hajj to get this movie made, and before he was persuaded that an African American should direct the movie, Norman Jewison (A Soldier's Story) wanted to do it. If Jewison had, the product would be about the same. Only the label would be different.