Amazon released this film just in time for Martin Luther King Day. It involved four major players during the Civil Right era, Malcom X, Casius Clay, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown. It discusses many racial issues, and it still has lessons that can be taken away for the problems our country has been facing this past year. It was a good movie, but it was forced to lean heavily upon their dialogue due to it being based off a play that was based off a true story. It was a good movie, but it was not great. It did do a good job of explaining issues that black people faced and are still facing.
One Night in Miami was about these four people meeting up in a hotel room after Casius Clay defeats Sunny Liston. It felt more like an intervention by Malcom X than a meeting though. Malcom X is known for his strong and radical beliefs, and the movie was about him trying to bestow these sensibilities upon the three others to help in the battle against segregation. It starts out with a mild tone, but as the movie progresses the tension amongst them rises and leads to more conflicting confrontations. X’s main goal was to get his friends to become more public in their fight against racism and to seem stronger handed than they were currently coming off as being. Although through most of the movie he seemed to come off as unsuccessful in his intervention, he seems to sway them partially to his side, if not fully by the end.
One of the most appalling scenes of the movie came in the opening moments when they were introducing the main players. Jim Brown went to visit this man on St. Simons island in Georgia, and the white man seemed like he was a huge fan of Brown. He talked very glowingly about him and was so excited to get to have a conversation with him. Then the man must go and help move something inside of his house, and Brown offers to help. The man who had seemed so friendly and warm tells Brown that he cannot have any black people in his house, but instead of saying black people, the old white man used the N word. Not only was it horrendous that this could be said to a person back then, but there are still people today that would talk like that, which is mind blowing. There is no reason why we can not treat people equally. It is disgusting that there was and is so much prejudice left in the world.
An interesting note on the movie that stuck out was Malcom X’s tone. So Malcom X was well known for being a radical member of the Civil Right movement. He did not shy away from conflict, but he would embrace it even if it meant having a more violent view. The odd thing was that he seemed to come off as more conservative and a nerd at the beginning of the movie. He does not seem to have too radical of a mindset when they first get into the hotel room, but as the story goes on and he focuses more on the inadequacies of his companions, and their lack luster efforts, then the radical parts come out. He really digs into Sam Cooke as not being a supporter of the cause. He felt like Cooke was letting white people run all over him and other black people’s music careers, but Cooke had some good reasoning to fight back otherwise. As X’s attitude changes and becomes more radical, it does through off Casius commitment some. Clay does not seem like he wanted to commit to something as radical as the position where X finished off. So the best part of the movie was watching the changing alignments and intensities of the characters.
When Malcom X started to go at Sam Cooke, the biggest area of concern he had was that white people were stealing black people’s musical work and getting all the credit for it. Cooke did have an interesting argument back that there had been some white people that had taken songs from black artists, but the black artists got a solid kick back form them, and they were still able to make good money. One of the last history classes I took at Berry was the history of rock and roll, and segregation played a way bigger role than one would think. There were a copious number of songs that were released by white artists that became super popular, but the white artists were not responsible for writing the songs. So in the case of Cooke he was able to receive royalties from the songs, but there were many black artists who sadly received no money or recognition. There were some big white artists that would fall into the category of taking a song without giving the credit to the black artists, and one of them was Elvis. Also one of the bigger songs that was taken by a white band that originally came from a black person was House of the Rising Sun. There are numerous more examples of black people being screwed over by segregation in the music industry, so it is good to know that Sam Cooke was able to get some kick back, but it would have been better if he got the enough respect from the white people in his time for songs from his production company to reach number one on the chart without having a white artist singing them, like the Rolling Stones, and having the original black artist get the acclaim.
Sadly these movies and TV shows that focus on the disparity between races seem to be of continual importance due to the lack of equality that persists today. It was seen over the Summer with the Black Lives Matter protests that there is a larger proportion of Black people being violently persecuted by the police, and even though many of the protests were peaceful, they got more violent responses with tear gas and rubber bullets, where as in the past week when the far right stormed the capital of our country when congress was meeting, they were able not only breach the building, but they were able to make it to some of the offices of our country’s higher ranking officials. In the words of Dan Lebatard, if those had been black people storming the buildings, the steps of our capital buildings would have been stacked with dead bodies. Also if the number of people who have gotten the Corona Virus are viewed, it is more proportionately skewed towards black people and minorities getting the virus, so clearly there are still many ways in which our country needs to improve to help create more equality.
This movie was good, but it did not quite reach my expectations. A large part of this came from it being adapted from a play. Since it was adapted from a play, this meant it was going to need to rely heavily on its dialogue. The set barely changes throughout most of the film, and there were times in the movie where it started to lull due to their lack of ability to change settings. It could have been improved if they spent some more time explaining the great things the characters accomplished in the period instead of just spending most of the two hours in a hotel room and on the roof of a hotel. I do think that they got the point across though. Movies and TV shows have started to address the theme of equality more and more, and they have done it in highly creative ways. So if you want a more creative symbolic view of racial inequality, I highly recommend anything that Jordan Peele has his name on: Get Out, Us, and Lovecraft Country. I gave this movie an 85. Technically it is still a 2020 movie even though it was released in 2021, so it was ranked sixth among 2020 movies that I watched.
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