Butler's Cinema Scene

“THE BLACK PANTHERS: VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION” My rating: B 

115 minutes | No MPAA rating

History comes to incendiary life in “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution,” a remarkably well-rounded portrait of the once-maligned African American organization that will leave viewers both inspired and perplexed.

Director Stanley Nelson (“Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple”) seems to have utilized every available photograph and newsreel of the Panthers from the late 1960s and early ’70s, and he gets some terrific comments and reminiscences from graying Panthers (not to mention former cops who maintain to this day that the Panthers were a terrorist organization).

His film effortlessly gets its arms around the knotty history of the group, its major players, and its continuing impact on American society.

Eldridge Cleaver

The doc tells us right off the bat that the Panthers weren’t a homogenous group. Politically they ranged from hardcore Marxist to conventionally liberal. The violence and militancy embraced by some members dismayed others.

The Panthers got their start in Oakland CA in 1967 largely as a response to an overbearing police presence that singled out the black community for persecution and brutality.

The group coalesced around three charismatic but very individual leaders.

There was the matinee-idol handsome and quick-tempered Huey Newton, who in the early ’70s would descend into a world of crime and paranoia.

Bobby Seale was a more traditional social activist, more comfortable with community service.

And then there was  jailhouse author Eldridge Cleaver (Soul on Ice), whose literary reputation  legitimized the movement in the minds of many white intellectuals even as his rhetoric became ever more strident. Says one former Panther of Cleaver: “That boy was crazy. He got a lot of people hurt.”

Huey Newton

Initially the Panthers were fairly conventional community organizers, setting up a breakfast program for at-risk kids.

When they began openly carrying weapons — clearly in an effort to intimidate police — the California legislature considered a bill to outlaw the carrying of arms on public property.
A crowd of gun-toting Panthers showed up on the lawn of the capitol to protest, in the process disrupting a photo opportunity between Gov. Ronald Reagan and a group of parochial schoolchildren.

Suddenly everyone was talking about the Panthers.

Taking notice was the FBI’s notoriously racist director, J. Edgar Hoover, who launched a secret program to infiltrate and discredit the

Bobby Seale

Panthers. And if any young black man — like Chicago’s Fred Hampton — should show signs of becoming the dreaded “black messiah,” that individual could find himself being gunned down in a pre-dawn police raid.

There are some really interesting revelations here.  For breathtaking thrills there’s the testimony of the Panthers who survived (most of them were wounded) an early morning raid of their Oakland headquarters and managed to drive off the police and hold them at bay for several hours.

And then there’s the largely unsung role of women in the group. For much of its history the Panthers’ membership was overwhelmingly female, and several of these women reflect on the rampant male chauvinism exhibited in the organization.

“We didn’t get these brothers from revolutionary heaven,” one woman wryly observes.

| Robert W. Butler