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SPIKE LEE MAY HAVE THE BIG MOVIE ON Malcolm X, but director Steve Anderson (who is white) got into theaters first with SOUTH CENTRAL. This earnest, low-budget melodrama places a similar fall-and-rise fable -- from street tough to jailbird conversion to patriarchal role model -- in the smoldering ghetto of South Central Los Angeles. The film's first half is an ethnographic survey of hell on earth: poverty, ignorance, testosterone and crime. The second half is rehab time: our antihero finds the spiritual strength to try to persuade his young son and a gang rival to renounce vendetta. In this uneasy mix of gritty and pretty, Anderson's achievement is to make the sermon almost convincing.