HOW THE FBI TRIED TO KILL KING’S DREAM

THIS fascinating documentary, releasing in the last full week of Donald Trump’s presidency, could hardly be more timely. Martin Luther King’s 1963 ‘I have a dream’ speech to the adoring multitudes in Washington DC remains as revered in the history books as Trump’s 2021 version will, it seems, be reviled. But two days after King’s address, an internal FBI memo called him ‘the most dangerous Negro in the future of this nation’.

J. Edgar Hoover, whose tenure as head of the FBI lasted, astonishingly, from 1924 to 1972, resolved to do all he could to undermine America’s best-known civil-rights leader. At first that meant trying to tarnish him as a communist sympathiser, but when wiretaps and hotel bugs revealed that King was unfaithful to his wife Coretta, the focus shifted to portraying him as a ‘moral degenerate’.

The story of the FBI’s campaign to discredit King has been told before on screen, and a fair amount of this material will be familiar to anyone interested in U.S. politics of that period (including civil rights protests, pictured). But enough of it is new, lifted from freshly declassified files, to make Sam Pollard’s film well worth watching.

It also features an interview with James Comey, the former FBI chief, dismissed by Trump in 2017. Comey declares himself ‘sick to my stomach’ over revelations from ‘the darkest part of the bureau’s history’, which include details of a letter sent to King, clearly from someone at the FBI purporting to be a well-wisher, in which he was invited to ‘do the right thing’. The letter arrived with a tape recording of King allegedly having sex with other women. ‘The right thing’ to do, it was implied, was to kill himself — although soon enough an assassin’s bullet did the job anyway.

FROM the past to the future, Archive is a good-looking but rather turgid sci-fi thriller, a first-time feature from British writer-director Gavin Rothery.

Theo James stars as a lonely American scientist in a remote Japanese base who is trying to bring his dead wife (Stacy Martin) back to life in robot form.

Alex Garland’s 2014 film Ex Machina covered strikingly similar territory much more grippingly.

MlK/FBi is available on digital download now, Archive from Monday.