I haven't seen Spike Lee's one indisputable masterpiece "Do the Right Thing" since reviewing it for this newspaper in 1989 -- but I remember it well.

It's hard to forget the heat that radiated from every frame of a film dominated by an orange, yellow and red color scheme that suffused a poor Brooklyn neighborhood during a hot summer in the late 1980s.

The temperature explains, though it doesn't excuse, the triviality that sparks the racial tumult that engulfs the community.

Buggin' Out (Giancarlo Esposito), the neighborhood loudmouth with revolutionary pretensions, stops into Sal's Pizzeria for a slice and is taken back by the lack of black faces on the pizza joint's "Wall of Fame." It's occupied by folks like Frank Sinatra, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.

Sal (Danny Aiello) reminds Buggin' Out that it is his pizzeria and that he's free to put anyone's face on the wall he wants. He encourages the whiner to open a competing pizzeria so he can put as many "brothers" on the wall as he wants.

Outraged, Buggin' Out organizes a boycott of Sal's Pizzeria that goes nowhere. Still, the fuse for a racial contretemps with tragic results is lit by his silliness.

I thought of "Do the Right Thing" when I read about Spike Lee's dust-up with fellow director Clint Eastwood over the absence of black faces in his World War II films "Flags of our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima."

Spike Lee argues that because a million African Americans contributed to the war effort -- including the taking of Iwo Jima -- it should have been visually documented.

To his credit, he didn't suggest anything as anachronistic as a black soldier participating in the famous flag raising at Iwo Jima, but you get the sense that Spike wanted some black faces "up on that wall" just as much as Buggin' Out did.

Historically, hundreds of black soldiers were involved in the battle, but they weren't in Mr. Eastwood's film. Still, Spike Lee is wrong to imply Clint Eastwood is guilty of racial revisionism by allegedly writing blacks out of the narrative.

Yes, blacks fought and died at Iwo Jima, but in segregated units. To spotlight black soldiers who aren't merely extras or tokens would have been to introduce an extra layer of narrative. A black face isn't going to move the story along necessarily.

An equivalent gesture would be if Spike Lee had introduced white characters to "Malcolm X" so that Caucasians had someone to "relate" to. It would have been preposterous.

In any case, Mr. Eastwood actually does deal with racism in "Flags," but not along the usual black/white axis. "Flags" explores the alienation and marginalization of one of the iconic flag-raisers of Iwo Jima -- a Native American.

Spike Lee has made these complaints before, but with far more legitimacy. He howled over director Mel Gibson's romantic portrayal of South Carolina's rural aristocracy on the eve of the Revolutionary War in his 2000 film "The Patriot."

There's an infamous scene in Mr. Gibson's film where the camera pans vast and beautiful Carolina farmland, though there's not a slave or indentured servant in sight.

That's a case where historical amnesia is willful and stupid. The presence of slaves would have distracted from the film's central conceit -- despite acts of terrorism committed in the name of liberty, the colonists were "innocent" in every other way.

The debate between these two directors took a really ugly turn when Mr. Eastwood said that Mr. Lee should "shut his face," thus ceding the high ground. It wouldn't be a Spike Lee controversy if slavery weren't invoked somehow:

"First of all, the man is not my father and we're not on a plantation either," Mr. Lee said. "[Mr. Eastwood is] a great director. He makes his films, I make my films. And a comment like 'a guy like that should shut his face' -- come on, Clint, come on. He sounds like an angry old man right there."

Spike Lee's next film is "Miracle at Santa Anna" which chronicles the exploits of an all-black Army division. It will be interesting to see what role if any white characters play in that film.

Meanwhile, Clint Eastwood is gearing up to shoot the post-apartheid drama "The Human Factor" starring Morgan Freeman as an elderly Nelson Mandela.

Presumably, a film about Mr. Mandela's heroic dismantling of a racist system will be "black enough" even for Spike Lee and Buggin' Out, should they be taking notes in the dark.