A C.I.A. satire that turns incendiary, The Spook Who Sat by the Door makes Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing look demure.
Based on the 1969 novel by Sam Greenlee, the movie stars the formidable, taciturn Lawrence Cook as Dan Freeman, a Black man recruited by the intelligence agency as a token of integration. Freeman sticks around for a couple of years to soak up as much counterintelligence training as possible, then returns to his hometown of Chicago—under the guise of a social worker—to secretly train young men as part of a “fighting Black underground.” Their goal? To wage a “war of liberation.” And that’s exactly what breaks out on the streets—a guerilla resistance, then advance, against the police, National Guard, and eventually the U.S. Army, all regarded as occupiers of the city’s South Side.
This understanding of Black neighborhoods being under occupation, as one facet of systemic racism, resurfaced in public conversation in the 2010s, in the aftermath of a number of police killings of unarmed Black men. (See the 2017 documentary Whose Streets?) In The Spook Who Sat by the Door, the “war of liberation” breaks out in the wake of just such an instance of police brutality.
Director Ivan Dixon—an actor best known for television’s Hogan’s Heroes who made this and 1972’s Trouble Man before being relegated to TV—films the protests and erupting violence over the shooting with a fierce, frenetic immediacy. There’s also some clever framing of Freeman within the bureaucratic spaces of the C.I.A., as well as a moody use of superimposition near the end, that suggests a filmmaking talent who deserved more shots at the big screen. The Spook Who Sat by the Door itself deserved more; largely forgotten amidst discussions of African-American cinema, I didn’t come across the film until critic Elvis Mitchell highlighted it in his invaluable 2022 documentary, Is That Black Enough For You?!?
(2/10/2023)
