Do the Right Thing

Set over one sweltering summer day on a single block of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Do the Right Thing builds from the small frictions of a neighborhood at boiling point — a pizzeria whose wall of heroes honors only Italian-American icons, a man's boom box at deafening volume, a string of petty slights and standing grievances — into something far larger. Lee's craft is the movie's most immediate pleasure: a heat-blasted, sun-drenched color palette, restless and expressive camerawork, and one of the great opening credit sequences in film, as Rosie Perez dances to a Public Enemy anthem. Critics were near-unanimous that the ensemble is exceptional, singling out Danny Aiello's proud pizzeria owner, Giancarlo Esposito's grievance-hunting Buggin Out, Bill Nunn's boom-box-toting Radio Raheem, and Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee as the block's elder figures — a neighborhood that feels lived-in, not typed.

The film deliberately refuses to pick a side, and that is where both its power and its controversy live. It moves from warm, funny, observational comedy into a shattering escalation that critics disagreed about at the time — some found the turn to violence contrived or didactic, others called it the truest portrait of American race relations the screen had yet produced. The famous closing gambit, pairing quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, refuses to resolve the film's central question: what, exactly, was the right thing? That open-endedness frustrated some viewers who wanted a clearer moral accounting, and it is precisely what has kept the film alive for argument ever since.

The loudest release-era dispute was never really about craft: a handful of prominent critics warned the film was dynamite that could incite real-world riots, accusations the filmmaker called racist, and which audience behavior emphatically failed to bear out. That fearmongering was never the critical mainstream's view — the film swept major critics' prizes, earned Oscar nominations for its screenplay and for Aiello, was placed in the National Film Registry within a decade of release, and now regularly appears near the top of all-time greatest-films lists. Few American films of the past half-century have aged so well while remaining so urgently, deliberately uncomfortable.