History in White and black
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen HISTORY IN WHITE AND BLACK BY JOHN SIMON We are confronted today with a pair of very needed documentaries, and confrontation is the word for Malcolm X and The Trial of the Catonsville...
...Sophocles' Antigone taught us nothing...
...It may be that, like The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, Malcolm X could not make a dent in the armor of Silent America's fatuity, an armor that, even undented, will prove no defense...
...Sainthood, like virginity, is not subdivisible...
...For these nine human beings, as their testimony richly demonstrates, are or were (one of them has since died) saints...
...The acting is good without being brilliant, and that, in a way, makes it all the more believable...
...as a quick and extremely keen intellect...
...but, in an unjust state, shouldn't he have...
...The play, first performed in Los Angeles, came to New York for a modest run -first in a church, then on Broadway-of 159 performances...
...There is one subtly potent moment that the rest cannot quite match...
...It might be objected that the Nine, expounding the events and complex reasons that led them to this act of civil disobedience, exhibit-along with their Christian and humanitarian concern-a certain smug or defiant self-righteousness, a measure of militant indignation...
...Less pardonably, it fails to speculate sufficiently about who killed Malcolm and why the case was never solved...
...The Catonsville judge seems to have been a decent, compassionate man and a good Catholic, like the defendants...
...On the sound track, most of the time, there is Malcolm's voice making appropriate statements...
...It is a moving record of a first-rate mind's and natural leader's evolution from apt mouthpiece for Elijah Muhammad's doctrines (many of them grotesque) to a magnificent position of rational revolt, controlled militancy, sound tactics, and righteous force-fulness...
...And watching these people -or these actors who convincingly re-create the people-leaves me with little doubt whether the pyre or the gallows would have deterred them...
...Only a few shots from behind some sort of diaphanous curtain of glass struck me as unduly arty...
...but film, alas, does not give as strong a sense of being there as the stage was able to convey...
...These films provide experiences that have less to do with moviegoing than with reliving chapters of our history that, however much behind us they may seem, are still very much with us-are, indeed, only a beginning...
...What I want to stress is that Malcolm emerges from this film as a brilliant and dynamic leader, perhaps too cerebral to be charismatic...
...Yet over against this there was the fact that almost every New York drama critic had glowing praise for the play and production, and, above all, for the re-creation of a significant event and the sharing in a momentous experience...
...He is reported to have shed tears for them...
...On Screen HISTORY IN WHITE AND BLACK BY JOHN SIMON We are confronted today with a pair of very needed documentaries, and confrontation is the word for Malcolm X and The Trial of the Catonsville Nine...
...Even the rhythm of the film suffers from this device...
...I hope to be excused, then, if what I write here is only secondarily film criticism...
...but the periodic cutting away to shots of the Vietnam war (including a recurrent image of bombs dropping in slow motion) and to antiwar protesters incurring police brutality, was, I think, a poor idea...
...But why not...
...For the early, unrecorded part of Malcolm's life, there is stock film and newsreel footage accompanied by James Earl Jones's narration from the autobiography...
...All those burnt, dead babies are much too shocking an image for mere human beings arguing the inhumanity of war to compete with...
...Protesters having their skulls cracked open have a way of making the calm, firm stand of nine defiant defendants look too quiet and self-defeating-almost too safe...
...Father Philip Berrigan explains that his position was reached in part by observing the injustices we inflict on Negroes: an act of solidarity with his black brothers...
...For here was a flexible, adaptable, progressive mind...
...What their end will be can only be guessed...
...We will continue immuring or immolating saints, even though it is manifest that human law is in some cases inadequate...
...true, the play is only an edited version of the transcript with some minor explanatory additions...
...True, people had read accounts of the case in newspapers and magazines...
...The person watching these films feels himself projected into them...
...Or, rather, how not...
...Or, failing that, to let them off with some symbolically nugatory fine, like that farthing of damages Ruskin was made to pay Whistler...
...But it may be that all responsible criticism transcends the immediate concerns of its particular discipline...
...he is obliged to take a stand on the issues raised and become involved as a human being first, and only secondarily as a film-goer...
...the judge might have lost his job...
...Malcolm X is a documentary based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written for the screen by Arnold Perl and coproduced by him, Marvin Worth and Malcolm's widow, Betty Shabazz...
...Suggestions are thrown out, but they seem rather limited and one-sided...
...Oh, yes...
...I cannot go into the absorbing details of Malcolm X-Such as its showing Malcolm on his eye-opening trip to Africa, or his very own brother condemning him in the name of Elijah Muhammad, or Martin Luther King commenting on Malcolm's assassination...
...There may, of course, be legal reasons for this reticence...
...and even angels, I suspect, come mainly in two varieties: militant or smug...
...at other times, we hear Billie Holiday or The Last Poets singing apposite songs...
...Here was a man who, without anything but the most rudimentary formal education, had taught himself to speak with greater elegance and command than most affluent and highly-trained white politicians and statesmen can muster...
...The fact that they were not burnt at the stake is irrelevant: Giving up years of one's brief life to prison is no small sacrifice...
...The scenes, instead of stressing the urgency and nobility of the Nine's action, manage to minimize them...
...for the later, public life, there is newsreel and TV footage, filmed interviews with Malcolm and other relevant figures...
...What the film is unfortunately unable to do is to depict Malcolm the human being (husband, father, brother, son, etc...
...Which raises the question of what you or I would have done in his place...
...Nevertheless, like the play, the film proves that the letter of the law is immortal and invincible...
...To see the play was, in my opinion, to come into the presence of saints, and the film, though it throws a few obstacles in our way-Some unavoidable, some not-Still offers us this chance...
...The film traces the development of Malcolm's political, religious and racial thinking and activism...
...A saint is, like other men, a little lower than the angels...
...The film captures all this in abundant and carefully structured detail...
...But such cinematic gains do not make up for the sizable chunks of the play that have been omitted, possibly for no better reason than to accommodate that un-needed documentary footage...
...though there are valuable glimpses or hints here and there...
...Why couldn't he have done the grand and glorious thing that one of them proposed to him: to address the jury differently and obtain acquittal for the Nine...
...All this is intercut with color sequences showing the grimness of Negro existence past and present, the growing protest and resistance, the liberating activities of various groups and individuals...
...The Trial of the Catonsville Nine is the film version of the documentary play Daniel Berrigan made of the trial of the seven men and two women who burned 378 draft records with homemade napalm at Catonsville, Maryland, in 1968...
...To show the draft-file burning and the Nine and their lawyer in informal discussions in the prison dining-hall, and to intercut this with the trial, is a legitimate way of providing relief from the courtroom scenes...
...and as a polished, witty, powerful orator and debater...
...Gordon Davidson, who directed the film as he did the play, and Saul Levitt and Father Berrigan, who collaborated on the screenplay, made one serious mistake...
...I make this absurd calculation to dramatize the dearth of interest in this important play, written by one of the Catonsville Nine from his jail...
...you have it, or you don't...
...We get a sense of a man whose loss was an immeasurable setback to the black cause-and possibly of no lesser consequence to the future of America and the world...
...What The Trial of the Catonsville Nine so clearly illustrates is that we have learned nothing from history and art: Joan of Arc was burned and canonized for nothing...
...The government's prosecuting attorney happens to be a black, and is walking back to his seat as those words are spoken...
...Why can't the Cauchons and Creons of today learn to revise, temper or circumvent a law whose enforcement can only turn them into the same despised wretches...
...Still, the camera movements and placements are often effective, and Haskell Wexler's color cinematography is, as always, highly expressive...
...only its spirit can be killed off or remain unborn...
...The camera discreetly moves down from his face to catch merely a black hand as it momentarily freezes...
...And what on stage looked wonderfully filmic-having the testimony of one person flow into that of another as one actor stepped away from the witness stand in mid-sentence to make room for another-looks on film, paradoxically, rather stagy...
...Which, of course, it was not...
...yet the occupational hazards of sainthood are nothing compared to those of ordinary solid citizenship: a self-righteousness and thickheadedness that beget war, racism and social inequity...
...But at least liberals and radicals can emerge from these films further instructed and fortified...
...or, roughly, one performance for every two-and-a-half records burned...
...Without some kind of satisfaction or righteous anger, no work can be done, not even a saint's...
...There is also his extraordinary courage, and the charming smile that accompanies his pointed but graceful humor...
Vol. 55 • June 1972 • No. 12
