“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.”
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