The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Ivan Dixon, 1973)

The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Ivan Dixon, 1973)
Rating: 9.1

Appropriately named Dan Freeman becomes the first African American CIA operative. After putting up with rigorous training as well as passing numerous physical and academic tests on top of the racism and discrimination, he is relegated to a remedial desk job in order to showcase the employee integration. He leaves the CIA to begin leading a double life as a social worker in Chicago by day and the leader of an underground militant guerrilla group known as The Black Freedom Fighters. Things escalate when I cop shoots a junky in the ghetto and riots break out. The national guard occupies the ghetto and the Black Freedom Fighters declare war. It's a miracle this film ever was able to be produced as it must have been frightening for white America at the time of it's release. The trailer included on the DVD presented the film almost as if it were horror movie. I anticipated the film to have a real low budget rough look to it, but I was really impressed with how professional it looks and it was edited by Michael Kahn, one of Hollywood's most renowned editors who does Spielberg's films. This is an extremely revolutionary film based on the book by activist Sam Greenlee and it assumes an us vs. them mentality with whitey as the enemy, but quickly evolves into more of a with or against after they find themselves combating other African Americans. Such recourse is a bit drastic, but the film presents everything in a fairly plausible fashion. It's important to establish that the message is more about promoting a less passive and more aggressive attitude, community cooperation, and encourage change in order to obtain freedom and dignity through use of a fictionalized and radical scenario as allegory.