The Spook Who Sat by the Door

By Michael T. Martin & David C. Wall

Based on Sam Greenlee’s provocative 1969 novel and, lease of “The

some say, urban revolutionary primer of the same name, Spook Who Sat
Ivan Dixon’s “The Spook Who Sat By the Door” (1973) By the Door” in
tells the story of Dan Freeman, erstwhile CIA operative 1973. Reflecting
and consummate revolutionary organizer. Aware of his and refracting
status as the CIA’s token affirmative action trainee, re- the tumult of
cruited in order to demonstrate the agency’s commit- these febrile po-
ment to racial integration, Freeman’s carefully consid- litical and racial
ered strategy is to maintain a low profile even while ex- contexts and
celling at all of the agency’s tests for both intellectual and events, the film
physical prowess. Thus, unfailingly polite and apparently itself was no less
always eager to please, he is the living embodiment of incendiary in its
Ellison’s invisible man, “yessing whitey to death” while uncompromising
discreetly learning everything he possibly can about ur- vision of an
ban guerrilla warfare. Finishing his apprenticeship with American socie- Lawrence Cook as Dan Freeman and
the CIA he returns to Chicago and proceeds to organize ty on the brink of Janet League as Joy. Courtesy Library
of Congress Collection.
the Freedom Fighters, a clandestine militia, out of the revolution. The
disparate and ill-disciplined Cobras street gang of his screenplay, written by Greenlee and Melvin Clay, offers
former neighborhood. a broadly non-orthodox Marxist social analysis rooted in
Third World independence movements and combined
In many ways, “The Spook Who Sat By the Door” is very with the radical racial discourses of thinkers such as
much a product in correspondence with its historical mo- Franz Fanon and Stokely Carmichael. Indeed, like Gillo
ment. Greenlee, who himself had worked as a Foreign Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers” (1966) and “Burn!
Service Officer for the United States Information Agency [“Queimada!”], 1969) that foreground the peasantry and
in Iraq, East Pakistan and Indonesia during the 1950s to lumpen-proletariat as vanguard in revolutionary for-
mid-60s, conceived of his novel while living in Mykonos, mations, in “Spook” the urban underclass and other mar-
Greece in the summer of 1965. In response to decoloni- ginal groups practice agential authority, constituting the
zation struggles throughout Africa and Asia, as well as vanguard for revolutionary change rather than proletariat.
the increasingly fraught and fractious trajectories of the
civil rights movement in the U.S., Greenlee “determined The film’s director Ivan Dixon, who had first found fame
to write the story of a Third World colonial revolution as it as an actor in Michael Roemer’s “Nothing But a
might happen in the United States.”1 By the time the Man” (1964) followed by his role as Sergeant James
novel was published in the U.S. in 1969, the rhetoric of Kinchloe in the CBS sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes” (1965-
non-violent protest as embodied in Martin Luther King 1971), shared with Greenlee a determination to present
Jr.’s SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) black agency, black heroes, and powerful black charac-
had been rivaled by more militant voices of “Black pow- ters who refuse to comply with the dominant tropes and
er” most notably those of SNCC (Student Non-violent stereotypes of Hollywood’s representations of race. But
Coordinating Committee) and the Black Panthers. This they were also concerned to lay an economic critique
in turn reflected a broader radicalization of social protest across the vectors of race. This conjoining of determi-
manifest increasingly by such disparate revolutionary nant categories of both race and class are most clearly
organizations as the White Panthers, The Black Libera- enunciated by Dan Freeman, instructing gang members
tion Army, The Symbionese Liberation Army, Weather that they understand themselves as a lumpen-proletariat
Underground, and the broad anti-Vietnam war coalition (read underclass), no less oppressed by the structural
in solidarity with other anti-colonial struggles in the global enclosures of class than by those of race. For example,
South. Further, events such as the police riot in Chicago at one critical point in the film, Freeman declares that the
at the 1968 Democratic Convention and subsequent uprising is not about hating white people but in loving
show trials of the Chicago Seven, the 1968 assassina- and longing for freedom for everyone. In this regard, the
tions of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the film is, arguably, most challenging by positing America’s
1969 assassination of Chicago Black Panther Fred ghettoes as internal colonies and class struggle led by a
Hampton, the murder of students at Kent State and black revolutionary vanguard but whose efficacy and
Jackson State, all attest to the volatility and indetermina- success depends on solidarity across racial lines.
cy of American society in the years leading up to the re- (Consider, too, that when King conjoined racial discrimi-
nation and economic inequality as both symptoms of obstacles. Though set in Chicago, the filmmakers (at the
capitalism his threat to ruling class interests was most behest of then Mayor Richard Daley) were refused per-
amplified, sealing his fate.) Indeed, some of the film’s mission to film anywhere in the city. As a consequence,
most excoriating critique is reserved for the ‘black bour- “Spook” was shot almost entirely just across state lines in
geoisie’ cast in the character of Joy (played by Janet Gary, Indiana where the filmmakers were welcomed with
League) who, as the wife of a prominent black doctor, an entire array of institutional support and resources
articulates an unexamined investment in the social, eco- (even be allowed the use of a Gary Police Department
nomic, and racial status quo. Admonishing Dan, she de- helicopter in order to get some overhead footage of the
fensively says, “Don’t romanticize those people Dan. riot scenes.) Though in hindsight “Spook”’s assertion of
They’re not beautiful . . . those Freedom Fighters are the immediate possibility of armed revolution might seem
murderers!” However, a corresponding female character, a somewhat naive fantasy of resistance that could never
The Dahomey Queen (Paula Kelly) labors on behalf of have played out in an American context, at the time it
the revolutionaries by spying on the CIA directorate’s was a theorized and commanding vision enough for the
plans to quell the rebellion, thus speaking just as power- LA Times’ Kevin Thomas to call the film “one of the most
fully to black women’s role in the struggle forward. In pre- terrifying movies ever made.”2
senting the Dahomey Queen in this way, “Spook” prof-
fers a conception of black women as freedom fighters no Many of those involved in the film’s production believe
less important than their male counterparts. And, too, that it was certainly subversive enough for the FBI to be-
Spook conceives of a revolutionary practice that simulta- come involved with the quiet removal of the film from ex-
neously engages the state security apparatus from within hibition. In Christine Achem’s documentary, “Infiltrating
(by infiltrators, disaffected police and military personnel, Hollywood: The Rise and Fall of The Spook Who Sat By
and professionals) as it does from without by armed the Door” (2011), Greenlee claims that movie theaters in
combatants. Chicago were subject to visits from representatives of the
FBI advising that it would be in everybody’s best interests
As may be apparent from the description above, “Spook” if the film were pulled from display. Though there is no
is highly unusual for an American film in that its radical direct evidence for this, it is certainly a view widely-held
left-wing politics are so overt and explicit. In a general by all those involved in the film’s production and consid-
sense, any dominant cultural apparatus will always ap- ering the dizzying array of disruptive tactics employed by
propriate and transform initiatives that threaten to desta- Hoover’s FBI and the Cointelpro program from the late
bilize it. Consequently, any narrative and visual possibili- 1960s onwards it is certainly by no means far-fetched to
ties under hegemonic conditions of representation are consider this plausible. All original copies of the film dis-
perhaps inevitably compromised. And, indeed, the ideo- appeared except for one that the film’s director Ivan Dix-
logical and anti-systemic concerns in “Spook” did not on secured in a storage facility under an assumed name.
trump economic ones in Hollywood’s distribution of the Having made the underground rounds on VHS through-
film. Of some significance in this context, is the 1971 re- out the 1980s and 1990s Spook was finally rereleased
lease of Melvin Van Peebles’ independently financed on DVD in 2004 after which it has begun to receive the
“Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.” The film’s mas- kind of critical and historical attention it demands.
sive success saw the major Hollywood studios rush to
replicate its themes and tropes and, in doing so, the 1
Sam Greenlee, “The Making of The Spook Who Sat By the
emergence of what came to be termed “Blaxploitation” Door.” (Unpublished email correspondence with authors, July 9, 2012.)
cinema. But the political possibilities of Blaxploitation in
2
terms of its presentation of powerful black heroes, stand- Kevin Thomas, “Melodrama with Powerful Message,” The Los Angeles
ing up to “the man,” and living entirely self-determined Times, December 17, 1973.
lives became rapidly compromised as the genre veered
increasingly towards celebration of drugs and violence
and the propagation of highly sexually charged black ste- The views expressed in these essays are those of the author and do
not necessarily represent the views of the Library of Congress.
reotypes.

United Artists response to this problematic film was to

initially market “Spook” as a Blaxploitation film but it
quickly became apparent that this was no ordinary Blax-
Michael T. Martin is Director of the Black Film Center/
ploitation flick. It is at this point that the historical and po-
Archive and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the
litical contexts of the film collide and where the singular Media School, Indiana University, Bloomington.
place that “The Spook Who Sat By the Door” occupies in
the history of American political cinema becomes appar- David Wall is Assistant Professor of Visual Studies in the De-
ent. Firstly, the production itself was subject to multiple partment of Art & Design, Utah State University in Logan, UT.