The worst telling of King's story I've ever seen

I don't even know where to begin on how much I agree.

Agreed. As I remarked before, they made MLK look like a neurotic milksop in this movie.

http://flavorwire.com/499650/selma-boycott-and-king-three-portraits-of -mlk-on-film

King’s writer/director Abby Mann also spends a good deal of time contemplating the effectiveness of non-violence, and the difficulty of it. King (played here by Paul Winfield) is so infuriated by hecklers during the Birmingham march that he charges at them and must be pulled back by his fellow ministers; later, in one of the mini-series’ best scenes, he has a long, thoughtful conversation with Malcolm X (Dick Anthony Williams) about their contradictory strategies.

As with Selma, both films pay due attention to the importance of strategy and tactics (albeit not always with DuVernay’s flair for conversational exposition — there’s a fair amount of stiff signposting, particularly in the mini-series). And both take pains, as Selma does, to humanize King, to treat him as both a leader and a man. Early in King, Damon Lockwood (the wonderful Al Freeman, Jr., who later played Elijah Muhammad in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X) meets King while he’s relaxing at home and pegs him a “hayseed” for chowing down on chitlins during their conversation. Later, worrying about his smoking, King muses, “I’m not a saint. I wish I were.” It’s not exactly subtle, but it gets the point across.

Of course, there’s one area of King’s non-sainthood that these earlier films don’t touch on: his affairs. His family’s refusal to allow filmmakers to wrestle with those stories is one of the reasons earlier attempts at comprehensive biopics have failed; Selma can only tackle them because it was produced without the family’s involvement (and without his speeches). They were involved in King — many of them even appear in it — so a strangely long chunk of the first episode is spent on his and Coretta’s courtship; when, in the third, the tapes and threats from the FBI arrive and he asks if she wants to know the truth about the rumors, she responds, “No, you don’t have to tell me anything, just put your arms around me.”

So that’s a bit of a dodge — one that Selma thankfully doesn’t take — and for its epic length (four and a half hours total, without commercials), there’s still a sense that King is leaving a lot out: just comparing the Selma chapter, for example, we not only don’t see “Bloody Sunday,” but it’s barely mentioned in passing. (On the other hand, there’s a whole scene where Tony Bennett pops in as himself and sings a song. TV was weird in the ‘70s.) What King’s length allows is for a bit more of the people around the edges: King’s father and brother are brought to pulsing life by Ossie Davis and Art Evans, while we see the harrowing murder of Viola Liuzzo (merely a chilling postscript in Selma). More importantly, it allows Mann (whose earlier writing credits included Judgment at Nuremberg) to paint vivid portraits of time and place; there’s a scene between Rev. Fred Shuttleworth (Roger Robinson) and notorious Birmingham sheriff Bull Connor (Kenneth McMillan) that masterfully captures the way racists of the period luxuriated in their petty power.

But ultimately, even with its bulky running time, King still doesn’t quite leave the viewer feeling as though we know the man, if such a thing is even possible. The definitive King biopic may never come to pass — and perhaps that’s for the best. In the meantime, books, documentaries (like the excellent, and recently restored, King: A Filmed Record… Memphis to Montgomery), and micro-focused snapshots like Boycott and Selma may prove the only way to piecemeal together a fully detailed picture of this great, vital, complicated figure.

I'm watching it now. I didn't watch it back then. I remember criticism about this because of how King is portrayed.

I'm already not impressed, mainly for fashions on extras, pure seventies, but that's no reason to criticize it, I know.

I was actually more impressed by Boycott, which I started watching and was rather blown away by the planning.

It's all in the way the movie is done, I suppose.

There must have been a 'need' to do a MLK movie, because Hollywood wasn't, that was racist. It could have been better than it was done tho.

Main complaints seem to be Winfield's performance.

Strange to think he would go on to portray the 'magic mirror' on The Charmings.