By Anthony Lane
In the late nineteen-fifties, James Stewart was on a roll. “Vertigo” came out in 1958, as did the sly and funny “Bell, Book and
Candle,” followed by “Anatomy of a Murder,” in 1959. A decorated veteran and a
loyal Republican, Stewart seemed at once trusty and perplexed—still a straight
arrow, but no longer sure, in the postwar world, of where, exactly, he was
aimed. Yet to come was “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962), in which he
and John Wayne duke it out for the values of the Old West. Was it, perhaps,
Stewart’s wish to prove himself steadfast, in spite of change, that impelled
him to star in “The FBI Story” (1959)? It runs two and a half hours, growls at
irony and doubt, and features a cameo by J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the
Bureau from 1924 to 1972. Stewart plays a longtime G-man, whose creed is nicely
distilled in this report on a current suspect:
On Sunday morning he left the house. He couldn’t be going to work. Since he was a Communist, we knew he wasn’t going to church.
So, that’s clear enough, though it raises a question: if you do go to church, or if you preach at a church, does that prove that you can’t be a Communist? Scenes from “The FBI Story,” and from other films and TV shows, are used as evidence in “MLK/FBI,” a new documentary, directed by Sam Pollard, which investigates the investigators in the age of Hoover. Specifically, with the aid of declassified documents, Pollard explores the Bureau’s campaign to spy on the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.—to record his words and deeds, and, given the chance, to wield them against him. As an internal F.B.I. memo read, “We must mark him now as the most dangerous Negro in the future of this Nation.”
That was written at the end of August, 1963, only days after King (a long-standing anti-Communist, as it happens) spoke at the conclusion of the March on Washington. “Free at last!” he exclaimed, whereupon the secret fetters were applied. Of particular interest to the Bureau was King’s close associate Stanley Levison, who had formerly harbored Communist sympathies and, as a treasurer in the American Jewish Congress, had supported the defense of the Rosenbergs. On the strength of such weak links, Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, was asked to approve the covert wiretapping of King, whom he openly admired. Kennedy complied.
If you wince at such revelations, get ready. There is more wincing to come, and Pollard forbids you to relax. The movie doesn’t stop for talking heads; commentary is supplied in voice-over, with the speakers’ names—Clarence Jones, say, or Beverly Gage—placed at the foot of the screen. Should this be your field, you will know that Jones was one of King’s lawyers (it was he who smuggled out the loose sheets of King’s writing that would form the basis of “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in 1963), and that Gage, a professor of history at Yale, is an expert on Hoover. We lesser mortals must wait until the end of the film to be enlightened
In short, “MLK/FBI” has a yen for narrative momentum, and you can see why. Pollard wants to capture not just the crusading urgency of King, who acted as if all too aware that his days were numbered, but the corresponding compulsions of Hoover, who publicly referred to King as “the world’s most notorious liar.” Once the wiretaps had uncovered King’s marital infidelities, the scrutiny of him acquired an excitable life of its own, far exceeding the original brief and reaching its vengeful extreme in the tapes that were sent to King’s wife, together with a letter addressed to King. Though anonymous, the letter was, in fact, composed by William Sullivan, the head of domestic intelligence at the F.B.I., and capped with a vague but menacing caution: “You know what you have to do.”
The most contentious detail in the film is the accusation, made in a typed F.B.I. report, that King was present when a female parishioner was raped in a hotel room, by a Baptist minister, in 1964. A scribbled note was added to the report: “King looked on and laughed and offered advice.” As one of the movie’s contributors points out, this is profoundly flawed as testimony; how could anyone determine, from an audiotape, that King “looked on”? Might it be that the addendum—disclosed in 2019 by David Garrow, whose biography of King won a Pulitzer Prize, and who appears in “MLK/FBI”—is mere scurrility, and, if so, why lend it any credence, or air it afresh on film? On the other hand, if the Bureau was making grave and deliberate mischief, is that not part of the historical record? (Sullivan described the allegation as “a golden opportunity to discredit King because of his communist connections and moral degeneracy.” So much for gold.) Further clarity will not be available until 2027, when the surreptitious tapes of King’s activities are unsealed, and this documentary, however dramatic its mood, is, in a sense, a prequel. Many people are confident that no damage will be done to King’s reputation as a result of the unsealing, although one retired F.B.I. agent, interviewed by Pollard, believes that the tapes should stay in the dark.
Viewers who find these quandaries depressing or distasteful should persevere with “MLK/FBI” nonetheless, for three reasons. First, it bears renewed witness to King’s eloquence, which is no less astounding in casual exchanges than on grand occasions; one interviewer is treated to a calm, impromptu diatribe against “the thingification of the Negro,” in slavery’s wake. Second, we are reminded, by Garrow and Gage, of an awkward truth—that Hoover’s F.B.I. was not some rogue outfit but a core component of the existing social structure, welded firmly to public opinion. Hence the movie’s clips from popular culture, which tends both to mirror and to magnify the prejudices and dreads of any given period. I was inspired by Pollard’s findings to watch “I Was a Communist for the F.B.I.” (1951), a feature film of more punch than subtlety, in which a largely African-American audience, in a Pittsburgh meeting hall, is roused by what the narrator calls “a hell brew of hate from a recipe written in the Kremlin.”
Third, and last, we have Ernest C. Withers—a minor tributary of the movie, you might say, yet almost as fascinating as the main flow. One of the leading Black photographers of his time, Withers took a memorable picture of King and others as they rode one of the first desegregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956. In “MLK/FBI,” we are shown a wonderful image of Withers, posed against his station wagon, in striped pants, with his foldable camera and flash. We are also told that, for eighteen years, he was an F.B.I. informant at the heart of the civil-rights movement. And that, with all due respect to James Stewart, is the F.B.I. story I want to see.
The title of Lili Horvát’s new movie, “Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time,” sounds like an accurate description of family life pretty much anywhere in the world in 2020. Surprisingly, though, the film is not about a virus-driven lockdown. Nor is it a prison drama, or a scorching documentary that rips away the fig leaves and brings us the real story of Adam and Eve. The tale that Horvát has to tell is elliptical, inward, and unrushed, played out on the smallest of scales. Much of it, indeed, appears to take place inside one woman’s head.
Márta (Natasa Stork) is a Hungarian brain surgeon, approaching forty, who has spent almost half her life in the United States. Now she is returning home, purely because of another doctor, named János (Bodó Viktor). She has encountered him only once, in New Jersey, at an annual meeting of the International Society for Neuro-Oncology—an obvious hotbed of desire—but that was enough to light the flame. They have arranged to hook up in Budapest, at the Pest end of the Liberty Bridge. (Another phrase that would make an excellent title.) When János doesn’t show up, Márta tracks him to the hospital where he works and confronts him in the street, whereupon he denies ever having seen her before. She faints.
What sets this film apart is its fusing of the impassioned and the grimly palpable. Márta may swoon, like a heroine of romantic fiction, and she throws away a comfortable existence for the spectre of a possible love. But what does she get? A damp and shabby apartment, where she sleeps on a mattress on the floor and dines off dark bread and cucumber, plus a job in a run-down hospital where the employees have to bring their own toilet paper. She consults a shrink, who asks her, “What comes to mind?” “That I’ve lost my mind,” Márta replies. Yet minds are her own business; we get a lengthy scene in an operating theatre, where she attends to the exposed brain of a conscious patient, who talks while she probes. The movie has a sifted texture, and some of the faces, and the naked bodies, are no more than granular blurs. Everything seems to slip our grasp, and it comes as a genuine disappointment when, toward the end, the puzzle of the plot is solved. Where’s the fun in that? If clarity is what Márta wants, she should have stayed in New Jersey.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/25/mlk-fbi-forbids-us-to-relax
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