In too many ways this is a fictionalisation of an incident that Scott Heron recounts in The Last Holiday, viz presenting demands to a university administration (Lincoln in his case, presumably-fictional Sutton here). The title and cover promised an account of how these institutions shaped Black thought circa 1968 but I didn't see too much of that; we get University President Calhoun's progression from firebrand radical to firebrand conservative, but that's the arc of many a man's life. We get the violent radicals, the stupid and the circumspect. I guess I hoping for some specifics about the cause like MLK and Malcolm X used to get into. Annoyingly his prose is a lot less sparky than he was capable of, and many things (such as racist cops) are lazily taken for granted. He could have expounded on some key historical events (like Kent State) that he instead merely gestures at. As Murrandoo Yanner keenly observed in The Tall Man, the white man should be bothered by this stuff too.
I supposedly saw this noir classic back in 2005. I don't remember a thing. The plot is baroque and there are far too many characters. Bogart and Bacall do their thing and the machinations and motivations are lost in the murk. There is some trademark Howard Hawks fast talking here and some good repartee, though it is delivered so flat that I often didn't believe what I'd heard. Bogart as a babe magnet at 45 has to be a running gag. Engaging for all of that. #178 in IMDB's top-250.
