MLK/FBI – Review

Last month the documentary feature DEAR SANTA proved to be the perfect film to coincide with the upcoming holiday. And though this week’s doc is only a couple of days away from its holiday, it couldn’t be more timely and relevant to today’s headlines. This coming Monday our nation once again celebrates the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (his actual birthday is Friday, but the official holiday, with schools and offices closed, is the third Monday of the month). Of course, he wasn’t as revered then, during his own lifetime, as he is now. Some groups openly despised him. At the top of that list, white supremacists like the Ku Klux Klan may have been the most vocal (and violent). But Dr. King had a more powerful enemy, very close to the President, none other than “G-man number one” J. Edgar Hoover, who put considerable effort into spying on and discrediting him. How did Hoover’s obsession over King begin? And just how far did it go? Most of those queries are answered and illustrated in MLK/FBI.

Though King is generally associated with the 1960s, the story of this conflict begins in 1956, when he made headlines for organizing the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. It also put him on Hoover’s “radar”. His immediate concern was King’s association with documented communist “leftie” Stanley Levison, an advisor/mentor and major fundraiser from NYC. But the wiretaps on his phones netted a “bonus” for the feds: King was a “player” indulging in many extra-marital “indiscretions”. Hoover had his new mission. Over the next dozen years, his agents made King their top priority with surveillance, phone-taps, and hotel “bugs”. Hours of audio recordings were collected as Hoover publicly called King “the world’s biggest liar” and his movement the greatest threat to US democracy. And he had a direct line to the oval office. JFK and his brother Robert, the Attorney General, even urged King to distance himself from Levison. After he receives the Nobel Peace Prize, King bonds with new President Johnson as he pushes through the Civil Rights Act in 64 and the Voting Rights Act the following year. But as the Reverend promoted non-violent protest, Hoover went on the attack, even sending a box of tapes to Kin’s wife Coretta and mailing him an anonymous letter (supposedly from a supporter) urging him to “do the right thing” (suicide). The harassment escalates when King goes out of favor with LBJ by speaking out against the Vietnam War. All ends with an ironic twist when the FBI devotes all of its efforts to capture King’s assassin, though many considered James Earl Ray a “patsy”, Hoover would stay on at the Bureau until his death in 1974.

Filmmaker Sam Pollard cements his reputation as one of the most talented historical documentarians, breathing vibrant life into often familiar iconic celebrated figures. Though much of his work has been presented through PBS venues (his look at the life and career of Sammy Davis, Jr. from 2017 is well-worth locating), Pollard proves his ability to work on a much larger canvas, with this feature theatrical triumph. Of course the “I have a speech” is represented with crisp, clear archival material (though there are some new camera angles), but he juggles other well-trod incidents (protests, newsreel snippets) with more intimate “at home” scenes (we even see the King children playfully dashing about), snapshots (King getting some sun at an island retreat), and TV kinescopes, from “Face the Nation” (being grilled by a baby-faced Dan Rather) and “The Merv Griffin Show” (along with fellow crusader Harry Belafonte, subject of another new great doc on his stint as a “Tonight Show” guest host). Pollard also provides lots of “face-time” with Hoover, showing us how the coifed “straight-hair” morphed over the decades into his “bulldog” persona. Some of the salacious tabloid-style stories around are briefly recalled while Pollard injects a bit of “camp” with the newsreel clips (a young actor Hoover to tell him how to “join up”) and depictions of his agents from Hollywood studio crime “potboilers” with actors in crisp double-breasted suits without a hair out of place (and yes, there’s Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. leading the way in the long-running ABC-TV Sunday night staple, “The FBI”). Writers Benjamin Hedin and Laura Tomaselli craft the film’s structure, forgoing one narrator and relying on comments from historians like Beverly Gage, current newsmakers like James Comey, and those surviving King confidants like Andrew Young, with most off-camera, though each gets an occasional “close-up” for impact. With their help, we learn that the country then was also divided with many siding with Hoover (in some news polls, over 50%), much of that split stemming from King’s wildly unpopular views on the war in Southeast Asia. And there’s a wide disconnect between his pleas for non-violence and the “man on the street” interviews dubbing him an “instigator of trouble”. The whole film makes for a great “crash course” in US history and leaves us with many questions about the release of those audiotapes, scheduled for 2027. The film’s “talking heads” split on their value and credibility, but 1960’s buffs and doc fans will be united in their appreciation for the enlightening and compelling MLK/FBI.

3.5 Out of 4

MLK/FBI opens in select theatres and screens exclusively in the St. Louis area at Landmark’s Plaza Frontenac Cinemas beginning Friday, January 15, 2021. It is also available as a Video-on-Demand via most streaming apps and platforms.