The spy movie that upset the American dream

There are movies whose back stories and reception histories are as compelling as the movies themselves. The Spook Who Sat by the Door is one.

An added attraction at this year’s New York Film Festival (where the movie is available online through Wednesday), this much-mythologized bombshell was conceived in fury, born in flames and, on its 1973 release, advertised as America’s “nightmare.”

Directed by Ivan Dixon, The Spook Who Sat by the Door was adapted from a bestselling novel by Sam Greenlee that, according to its author, was rejected by nearly 40 US publishers before it was brought out by a British house in 1969.

Both the novel and the film, which Greenlee produced with Dixon, concern an apparently docile Black CIA employee with the allegorical name Dan Freeman. Recruited as a public relations gesture, Freeman plays the long game, using what he has learned at the agency to mastermind a guerrilla war in Chicago.

The novel was a thriller, but Greenlee — a veteran of the US Foreign Service — used it as an exposé of institutional racism. Spook is both a racial slur and a slang term for spy; seated “by the door” suggests a person hired for show.

To direct, Greenlee enlisted Dixon, an actor (then a regular on Hogan’s Heroes) who had recently directed Robert Hooks in the slick, studio-produced blaxploitation film Trouble Man. Made outside the movie industry, Spook was meant to mess with pop culture conventions. Greenlee originally wanted Clarence Williams III (The Mod Squad) as Freeman, the earthbound superhero who, disguised as a mild-mannered social worker, transforms a Chicago street gang into an underground fighting force. The part ultimately went to a 42-year-old member of the Negro Ensemble Company, Lawrence Cook.

Racial solidarity is the movie’s subject and the project’s DNA. Not only did Greenlee raise money from Black investors and get a fellow Chicagoan, Herbie Hancock, to write the score, he was able to use Gary, Indiana, one of the first large US cities to elect a Black mayor, as a stand-in location for Chicago, thus enjoying the cooperation of the municipal authorities for powerful riot scenes.

The white characters (mainly male authority figures) are fools, brutes, knaves and patronizing liars. The Black ones are also stereotyped but given greater depth. The movie suggests a live-action animated cartoon in which the whites have two dimensions and the Blacks have three.

But if Spook is a cartoon, it’s one animated by the ideas of radical psychiatrist and champion of decolonization Frantz Fanon. The movie is an analog to anti-imperialist films like The Battle of Algiers albeit in the guise of a blaxploitation cheapster, which is how it was presented to distributor United Artists to secure completion money.

Spook opened in September 1973 in the midst of televised Watergate hearings, several years after the FBI’s secret Counterintelligence Program (Cointelpro) disabled the Black Panthers. Paranoia was high. The year’s other independent features included the white vigilante tale Walking Tall and the John F. Kennedy conspiracy docudrama Executive Action. An anticipatory article in The Chicago Defender, the nation’s preeminent African American weekly, wondered if “Greenlee’s masterpiece” might “touch off race warfare.”

Unsurprisingly, reviews were mixed. New York Magazine characterized Spook as “completely irresponsible.” The New York Times critic Vincent Canby gave a more cautious appraisal: The movie is “seldom convincing as melodrama,” but “the rage it projects is real.” Indeed, midway through, the police trigger a violent chain reaction — shooting an unarmed kid as he flees through a back alley — that is still unfolding when Spook ends.

Some weeks later, the Times ran a Sunday think piece with the headline “This Spook Has No Respect for Human Life.” It concluded that “not just a film about Black people,” Spook was “a valuable lesson” in dramatizing “man’s response to oppression.” By then, the movie had pretty much disappeared. Greenlee said that after three weeks in release, during which FBI agents hounded exhibitors to pull the film, UA withdrew it from circulation, citing poor box office grosses. (According to the Internet Movie Database, Spook brought in $270,000 during its abortive run.)

White America was spooked. The movie was blamed for serving as a Black Panthers textbook and for inspiring the Symbionese Liberation Army, the largely white revolutionary cell that would go on to kidnap Patty Hearst. Lawrence Cook’s big-screen career went nowhere; and despite becoming a prolific TV director, Dixon would never direct another theatrical movie. Still, Spook had a fugitive existence, circulating for years on bootleg VHS tapes in video stores.

In 2003, actor Tim Reid found the only extant 35 mm print stored under a different title. In 2004, the movie was reissued on DVD. Seven years later, it was the subject of a documentary feature; and a year later, it was named to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. In 2018, the novel was optioned by Lee Daniels for a TV miniseries, and the movie occasioned an anthology of academic papers.

Like all cult films, Spook blazed a unique path to the canon. Historically, it can be bracketed with two earlier, highly successful independent productions — Putney Swope, a 1969 absurdist comedy by white director Robert Downey in which an African American takes charges of a Madison Avenue advertising agency; and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Melvin Van Peebles’ groundbreaking celebration of a Black outlaw, released in 1971. But unlike Swope, Spook is something other than hip satire and, as opposed to Sweetback, it did not lend itself to recuperative commercialization.

Sweetback spawned blaxploitation (Van Peebles demanded that his movie’s X rating apply only to white patrons); The Spook Who Sat by the Door subverted it. Although the movie was deemed PG, one can only imagine the ruckus had it been released during the upheaval of 1970. Seen today (or juxtaposed with the 1971 documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton, an investigation into the police killing of Chicago’s charismatic Panther leader), the title has a third meaning.

Spook may be a eulogy, but the most shocking thing about this unquiet movie is how relevant it remains.