THE SPOOK STILL SITTING BY THE DOOR
A restoration of a 1973 movie of black agit prop well worth seeing
I remember reading Samuel Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door’ as a precocious and curious thirteen year old and it rocking my young world. My mother was a politically conscious teacher in Brooklyn and my her boyfriend was a teacher at the same school who’d bring the Panther newspaper over to our place. I imagine one of them passed on the novel to me. Unlike the James Bond books my mother adored, this page turner had a deeply revolutionary purpose. Instead of the lead spy being a loyal subject of the Crown, Dan Freeman was the first black agent in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency who, using skills taught by agency, organized a black street gang in Chicago into a revolutionary cadre. The book essentially took a Sidney Poitier character and gave him the soul of Huey Newton. Freeman was a “spook” as in a black man and a “spook” as in spy. It was a black nationalist wet dream.
Not surprisingly the book was rejected by numerous American publishers before Greenlee found support in the United Kingdom from Allison & Busby. ‘Spook’ was published in the U.K. in March 1969 and later in the U.S., France, Italy, Holland, Japan, Finland, and Sweden. Within the black community it was a sensation. If you hadn’t read it you couldn’t wear a dashiki!
Black director’s like Ossie Davis and Gordon Parks were just entering the Hollywood system in the late ‘60s and Melvin Van Peebles’ indie feature ‘Sweet Sweetback’s Badassss Song’ was just about to drop. A film adaptation was released in September ‘73 which was directed by Ivan Dixon, who folks at the time mostly knew as “the black guy” on the CBS sit-com ‘Hogan’s Heroes.’ But Dixon has a serious legacy as the lead actor in ‘Nothing But A Man,’ a 1964 drama in the neorealism mode that co-starred Abby Lincoln. He’d parlayed his acting into becoming one of network TV’s first black directors before helming the 1972 Los Angeles set feature crime ‘Trouble MAN,’ starred Robert Hooks with an iconic score from Marvin Gaye.
Greenlee and Dixon raised the money and produced the film version ‘Spook.’ Though the novel is set in Chicago, they ended up doing most of the shooting in nearby Gary, Indiana with the support of black Mayor Richaard Hatcher. I have a vague memory of seeing a scratchy print of the film at a Times Square grind house. The film got an limited release in the ‘70s and became more a rumor than a regularly screened movie on the revival house circuit.
Now a restored print is playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Rose Theater and I can say it is easily the most uncompromisingly political African-American feature film ever made. The opening section of Freeman’s entry into the CIA is rather dry with nondescript offices and what looks like a high school hallway substituting for CIA’s Langley headquarters. Once he gets to Chicago and begins recruiting a local street gang at pool hall, the film’s pace and quality pick up. The police shooting of a drug dealer sets up a violent confrontation between officers and black citizens that’s as visceral as documentary footage from the 2014 Ferguson street battles. It’s the cinematic high point of a film set in ‘73 and yet the footage is so familiar it could have been lifted from Tik Tok. Lawrence Cook, one of the many strong black actors who worked in several features during blaxploitation and very little afterwards, is the mouth piece for Greenlee’s pointed thoughts on the need for, and costs of, a true black revolution in America. Make no mistake, ‘Spook’ is agit prop for the hows and why’s of “sticking it to the man.” There is some good character work in the film, particularly Janet League as Freeman’s bougie girlfriend and Paula Kelly as a clear headed hooker, but Greenlee’s character’s are two dimensional figures created to address his points. The organized black revolutionaries of the ‘70s were either “neutralized” (killed, incarcerated) by the FBI and police authorities or burnt out by futile efforts to ignite fundamental change. ‘The Spook Who Sat by the Door’ plays today as a “what if” scenario with a score by Herbie Hancock.
If you’re in the New York area this August, here’s a link to buy tickets at BAM below.
https://www.bam.org/film/2024/the-spook-who-sat-by-the-door
If you’d like to read the book here’s a link to the book.
https://www.amazon.com/Spook-Door-African-American-Life/dp/0814322468