*The new film "American Gangster" is causing concern among several African American newspaper columnists, who believe in large part that its depiction of Harlem drug kingpin Frank Lucas will encourage young black men to follow in his footsteps.

In his Journal-isms column, Richard Prince lists a number of excerpts from columnists who take issue with the film, which stars Denzel Washington as the notorious heroin dealer.

• Elmer Smith in the Philadelphia Daily News commented that it lifted "lowlife to new heights for a generation that doesn't remember or even care who they really were."

• Betty Bayé wrote in the Louisville Courier-Journal that she had talked to a friend, a former New York school teacher, who told her "Frank Lucas is the devil ... and some knuckleheads are going to go out and see that movie and think that they want to be just like him."

• The New York Daily News' Stanley Crouch compared the movie to the profile of Lucas on a recent episode of BET's documentary series, "American Gangster." In the film, Crouch said, "Frank Lucas has been given qualities that he simply did not have. We see him played as a soft-spoken and sophisticated man who closely studies the written word and only explodes into violence every now and then. In actuality, as the BET documentary reveals, Lucas was illiterate. ... He not only killed people to impress his ruthlessness on the underworld, but even put out a murder contract on one of his own brothers, whom he had brought from North Carolina to work in the drug trade with him. Lucas squashed the contract only because another brother had been killed and the drug lord did not want his mother to have to mourn for two dead sons at the same time. Always a family man. That such icy qualities are not in the movie makes it a highly crafted piece of poisonous eye candy."