TV REVIEW : ‘Malcolm X’: CBS Offers ‘Real Story’

In at least one way, Spike Lee is right. Malcolm X’s life was so circuitous, so full of Saul-to-Paul conversions, so swept up in the swirl of great issues that any account of the black leader’s life does need plenty of time--like the 3 1/2 hours of Lee’s sprawling new film--to tell the full story.

So it’s fair to ask, how can CBS dare issue forth a mere hour report on the man and title it “Malcolm X: The Real Story” (at 9 tonight, Channels 2 and 8)? The timing is no less obvious than the title’s implication: Dan Rather’s report (which is also available on videocassette) is riding the coattails of a movie with social phenomenon built into it, suggesting that it is somehow “real” while the movie is . . . what? Unreal?

Well, of course it is. But Lee’s whole conception is leagues away from the docu-bio-pic, from Denzel Washington’s deliberately non-literal interpretation of Malcolm to Lee’s constant, stylishly irreverent tweaking of the “Gandhi” school of “real life” movies.

Ironically, though, rather than cashing in on the film while also driving a wedge between it and its subject, “The Real Story” is actually a fine accompaniment to “Malcolm X,” with friends, enemies and observers of Malcolm speaking frankly about his days as a street hustler in the ‘40s, to his conversion to Islam in the ‘50s, to his ascent as the most uncompromising voice of black liberation in his generation.

Lee takes these three acts of a life in almost equal measure (much to the chagrin of playwright-activist Amiri Baraka), while “The Real Story” weighs things much more toward the later, better-documented periods.

Mike Wallace, who made “The Hate That Hate Produced,” the first CBS report on the rise of the Black Muslim movement, seems almost contrite talking with Rather about how he didn’t know about Malcolm’s early criminal days--to say nothing of his tragedy-marred childhood--as the background for his stunning spiritual turnaround. It’s that rare, revealing moment of a reporter critiquing himself.

The media prism works in another way in Rather’s report: More than in “Malcolm X,” the love affair between the leader and television is examined as a key element in his success. Malcolm biographer Peter Goldman remarks that Malcolm probably understood the usefulness of a sound bite before anyone else (and there’s plenty of evidence here to support the claim). Yusuf Shah, a loyalist of Black Muslim head Elijah Muhammad, with whom Malcolm finally parted, suggests that Malcolm was addicted to the attention of cameras.”

This is just one layer of the jealousy that worked like a poison through the Black Muslim ranks in the early ‘60s, as Malcolm’s public profile eclipsed Muhammad’s, and climaxed with Malcolm’s denunciation (to, of all people, Mike Wallace) of the Muslim leader.

But whether the FBI or CIA had anything to do with the 1965 assassination of Malcolm is not something that even this “Real Story” can get to the heart of: Rather informs us that CBS’ application, through the Freedom of Information Act, for thousands of pages of relevant FBI documents is “being processed” for two more years.