New Yorkers Get A Chance To Resdiscover (Or Discover) ‘The Spook Who Sat By The Door’

A truly radical work of cinema get a theatrical release in New York City starting today. But it’s not a new film, and it certainly isn’t playing in any big-chain theater, and isn’t even playing in most art-house theaters in the city. The Blaxploitation-era thriller from 1973 called The Spook Who Sat by the Door is now available in a new 4K restoration. It will play theatrically at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Maysles Documentary Center in NYC.

Perhaps you haven’t heard of it; I admittedly hadn’t before reading about it in this excellent recent history of Blaxploitation cinema (full disclosure: written by a friend). Even though the Library of Congress’s inducted it into National Film Registry in 2012, there are good reasons for its relative obscurity until now. For one thing, the studio pulled Ivan Dixon’s film from theaters a week after its release in September 1973 for reasons that remain mysterious even today. And its home-video history has been spotty at best, last seen in a DVD release 20 years ago and long out of print.

Maybe one shouldn’t be surprised at its suppression, given how inflammatory its story is. Based on co-screenwriter Sam Greenlee’s own novel of the same name, ‘Spook’ is essentially about the makings of a Black guerrilla revolution. For its mastermind, Dan Freeman (Lawrence Cook), the process is long but meticulous. After the Central Intelligence Agency decides, upon political pressure, to open up its ranks to African Americans, Freeman ends up being the only candidate among its first batch of recruits to complete its deliberately arduous training program.

His reward, however, is to end up as a desk jockey, the forward-facing token Black employee. Freeman accepts his position, though, because, as it turns out, he’s playing a long game. After five years, he eventually quits and returns to his Chicago hometown, where, under the cover of working for a social-services nonprofit, he begins to recruit young gang members to become so-called “freedom fighters,” teaching them tactics he learned at the CIA.

Yes, the Black main character’s surname is “Freeman,” and the film depicts all of the white characters as either deceptively craven, well-meaningly patronizing, or just embarrassingly tone-deaf. The Spook Who Sat by the Door is hardly subtle in its critique of a society so fundamentally diseased in its race relations that the only way forward is through extreme action. But as can be the case with stereotypes in general, just because the movie broadly conceives these characters doesn’t keep their characterizations from containing hard truths. The flashes of wicked dark humor Dixon and Greenlee, who adapted his book with Melvin Clay, put into the film also help, most memorably a scene in which one of the young radicals, moonlighting as a janitor, robs an oblivious white CEO, basically while he’s sitting at his desk.

The film is hardly a simplistic political screed, however. Though Freeman’s efforts and their explosive fruition make up most of its narrative, the film does give voice to those who might find his violent radicalism objectionable. There’s his ex-girlfriend Joy (Janet League), who got early glimpses of Freeman’s militant side in college, and who, late in the film, articulates her belief that the violence that has engulfed Chicago might have the power to set back racial progress in America. And then there’s Dawson (J.A. Preston), a childhood friend who is now a police officer in Chicago and is perhaps trying to play the white man’s game for the sake of never-to-be-achieved career advancement. Such debates about how Black people can best conduct themselves in a society that works to oppress them are still raging to this day.

Beyond its overt sociopolitical anger and pitch-black satirical humor, though, it’s Freeman’s impenetrability as a character that holds our interest throughout. Unlike Greenlee’s book, which dives fairly deeply into Freeman’s inner thoughts, Dixon keeps him at an emotional remove throughout the film. Thus we’re as surprised as his CIA colleagues are when he decides to quit, and only after he starts his recruitment process back home in Chicago do we realize the startling depth of his cool calculation. Cook’s subtly layered performance is remarkable in that regard: We have no trouble believing he could be convincing as an Uncle Tom to the white folk, a player to the ladies, and a political radical to his guerrilla recruits.

The film ought to have raised Cook’s profile in Hollywood. But then, the film as a whole should have set the cinematic world on fire: an electrifying thriller that’s also an incendiary political statement from a major studio (United Artists). But the film’s suppression soon after its release in ’73 basically ended Dixon’s career as a film director (most of his directorial credits after this one are of television episodes), and Cook didn’t get any high-profile film roles afterward. It may be too late for Dixon, Cook, or Greenlee—all of whom have long passed away—but, thanks to this new 4K restoration, it’s not too late to rediscover the still-shocking masterpiece that is The Spook Who Sat by the Door.