About three months after the Rodney King Riots of the Spring of 1992 happened nationally, I was sitting in a cramped apartment in the Pittsburgh Neighborhood of Oakland with two colleagues, One White and one African-American. It was a late muggy Summer night, my White friend Mark was a Musician (and still is), my African-American friend Sherman was an Entrepreneur, in addition to having a hand with music productions. As we shared Beers, cigarettes and puffs of Marijuana, the subject of how far riots could go in America that were centered in the Black community was delved into. Sherman offered a take that there were so many members of the United States Military that were African-American by this point in History, that a conflict of some sort that involved a Unified Front of African-American soldiers against an opponent as menacing as the United States Military could result in a paralyzing stalemate. Highways, Rails, Seaports and Airports could all be shut down by a force of coordinated Black troops. Businesses, Banks and mechanisms of Industry as well as Power Plants and Reservoirs could be seized, a focused African-American Military presence could bring America to it’s knees overnight, he surmised.
I was quickly reminded of this conversation five years later when I was rooming with another friend named Darryl, Darryl had been previously in the Marines a few years ago and was from New Jersey with the Jersey speech pattern and delivery, I had family from Massachusetts so we spoke a familiar language. Darryl and I shared an apartment in an East Liberty duplex while I worked as a Clerk at a Blockbuster Video Store on the South Side of Pittsburgh, Pa. I used to bring home free movies; at the time they were mainly widely available on VCR tape, from the store for us to watch at our leisure. One time, Darryl mentioned to me, “Hey, Yo, Ian, your store got that movie, ‘The Spook Who Sat by the Door’”?
I had seen the title before in the store’s “Black Action Movie” section, yes, that was really a thing in video stores in the 1990’s. The quality of the store’s copy that I found of the film was so bad it was hard to focus on the film, it would be years until I could locate a DVD copy and truly get a sense of the film’s pointed message. Directed by Ivan Dixon, TSWSBTD was based on a controversial 1969 novel of the same name by author and co-screenwriter Sam Greenlee (along with co-screenwriter Melvin Clay). After viewing the film a second time in an improved format, I came to realize that quite a few films, mostly action movies, appear to have been influenced by this under-looked gem from 1973, including Jordan Peele’s “Get Out”, John Carpenter’s “Assault on Precinct 13” and the riot scenes from Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing”, among potentially other films as well.
TSWSBTD seems to be a reaction of sorts to the seemingly organized assassinations of peaceful leaders in the United States in the 1960’s as well as the assassinations of members and leaders of Urban populist organizations such as The Black Panthers. The film portrayals of the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr such as “Heatwave” from 1992 or the more recent “Detroit” show an America getting ready to come apart at the seams in a tidal wave of anger, frustration and vindicated retribution. The movie TSWSBTD goes beyond civil disobedience and into the territory of armed revolution. Considering the film’s low cost, (what major studio in 1973 was going to invest heavily in a film about organized African-American Guerillas in a sympathetic uprising against the United States Government?) Dixon and the Screenwriters do a remarkable job fomenting a tense atmosphere throughout the film.
The movie opens in a politician’s office, it is one of the scenes in the movie that seems amazingly clairvoyant in that it could be referring to present times without skipping a beat. A random politician (Played by Joseph Mascolo), who we never see again, the conversational scene is more of an analogy, is discussing campaign strategy with a key member of his campaign staff, including a White Woman who discusses reelection philosophy and an African-American woman who appears to be his analytics expert. The latter deals in cold-hard data and random polling results. The data expert relays to the politician that he trails in the polls in part due to low support from African-American voters, that the data shows that the voters don’t like the Politician based on his ties to the Establishment and the status quo’s desire to subjugate Black people.
The Politician surmises that in order to win over People’s vote for his reelection, he feels the need to call out the wheels of power, including Law Enforcement, for not including enough people of Color in it’s infrastructure, that keeping African-Americans out of America’s three branches of Government leads to the African-American community’s penchant for feelings of disenfranchisement. The Politician surmises that making the people aware of the sentiment will bring positive Minority attention to his campaign. In tune with this brand of thinking, the following scene in the film shows the CIA attempting to recruit and promote it’s first African-American member to appease the media frenzy set off by the desperate Politician. This film 50 years ago shows itself to be keen to the idea that social change can be instigated by disingenuous Politicians looking for angles in their reelection campaigns. The film inferring that symbolically, African-Americans have no part or inclusion in America’s espionage apparatus.
One of the first of these recruiting scenes shows dozens of African-American CIA candidates in their underwear being evaluated by CIA personnel. The White establishment types in this picture are bookish intellectuals who speak of Black people as being of a lower social merit behind closed doors, but also throw in devaluing comments to African-Americans in conversation. The CIA personnel inspect the candidates in their underwear like livestock, I was reminded of the yearly coverage of the NFL combine that is shown on television, an event typically showing a majority of African-American athletes in their underwear, being evaluated by other Men, mostly White, who are fully clothed. Seems to be inherently demeaning and intimidating. In the film, the training of the candidates is whittled down to ten, at which point we begin to meet specific characters.
The audience is introduced to Dan Freeman, who seems to be a unique individual. Freeman is played by Lawrence Cook, who gives an electrifying performance. Cook captures Freeman’s ability to appear restrained and patient, while seething under the surface and pursuing a kind of righteous vigilance. A scene with just White CIA administrators shows them to be mostly confident that they won’t have to hire any African-Americans and have the excuse that they tried. Since they have to document everything and be accountable, the only countenance to their enthusiasm is the performance of Freeman. Freeman is on his way to passing their tests and being accepted into the agency, Once in, members of the agency say things to Freeman like “You’re a credit to your race” while additionally making statements to Freeman about Black people not paying their dues historically to warrant being granted more power in the American Power Infrastructure than they already have.
Freeman is submitted to all kinds of White skullduggery; the White Female secretary who questions Freeman on why he isn’t friendlier or more flirtatious or flamboyantly subservient to her, as if to say that this is the White perception of the expected social dynamic between Black Men and White Women. Then there is the White Martial Arts Instructor, who attempts to establish dominance over Freeman while teaching him Judo. In the true sense of the essence of Judo, Freeman turns the instructor’s racist energy back on him and uses the instructor’s White Male rage against him, putting him on his ass, much to the surprise of the instructor. The Instructor shows both his own lack of virtue due to his self-blinding through White hate and his fallibility when he questions Freeman’s display of what the Instructor deems to be “fake humility”. We discover that Freeman’s humility is quite real and it powers his ability to succeed against those that wish him to fail.
Freeman informs his haughty White superiors that he intends on leaving the Agency after Five years, he intends to return to his Hometown of Chicago and begin a career as a Social Worker to assist those in need. While he receives his Agency training, we are introduced to the two main Women in his life. One is a Woman who is part of the Formal World, Freeman’s love from College, a lighter skinned Woman named Joy. Joy and Freeman spend quality time together as a couple, yet Joy yearns for a man that is productive in the system, Dan’s desire to live a dangerous life concerns her and her dreams of stability. The other woman in Freeman’s life is a prostitute that he has met while in CIA training, named Dahoney Queen. Queen seems to know Freeman better than he knows himself and she is loyal. Freeman is a very private guy, if he ‘s not spending time with one of his Women, he is reading or doing something incessantly productive.
When Freeman returns to Chicago after his five years in the CIA, the plot alters as we discover that Freeman wasn’t tolerating belittlement at the hands of the White people in the CIA because he was passive, he was pretending to be demure in order to understand the inner workings of the CIA. In turn, he is looking to apply his new found knowledge and reassemble his old Street gang from his youth into a Political Guerilla Organization. Freeman doesn’t just want to create protests, he wants to begin an armed insurgency. The remainder of the film follows Freeman and his colleagues from his Chicago Street Gang training for and executing acts of tactical violence against Banks, Armories, Radio Stations and the United States Military.
Freeman’s spoken manifesto is that of creating a military stalemate with the United States Government domestically by creating hotbeds of armed hostility areas out of America’s cities. In return, the violence would only desist when Black people would be granted increased autonomy over their own lives and living conditions. That based on the legacy of the contributions to America’s growth on behalf of Black People, that they have been given short shrift by the United States Government, an institution that Black people have been contributors, defenders, curators and creators of.
Freeman has an old childhood friend, a friend who the plot unveils that the friend is now a police officer, played by J.A. Preston (you might remember Preston from 1981’s “Body Heat” as William Hurt’s Police buddy). there are several scenes of contentious dialogue between the radical Freeman and the pro-law and order Officer Dawson. The scenes are engaging diatribes on modern social philosophy concerning America. Dawson takes the social vantage point taken by Freeman’ s girlfriend Joy, that law and order must be maintained and individual success found within the machinations of the system is preferable to outright revolution. Freeman counters that Black Americans live in a delay, that America’s Black neighborhoods are occupied by a silent army that can strike at a moment’s notice. America’s African-American neighborhoods are economic cannon fodder, according to Freeman. Director Dixon shows scenes of urban blight as if housing in the inner cities resembles prisons or cages.
Some of the film’s unintended infamy lies in the public perception of the meaning of it’s title. The title from Greenlee’s book, while certainly provocative at first glance, is actually a clever play on words. The use of the word “Spook” is immediately honed in for its’ potential racial insensitivity, but “spook” is also a spy term for an operative in the field. Particularly one in surveillance or intelligence gathering, a spook could also be a field operative who assimilates data or engages in a litany of espionage operations. This is what you might refer to as a big idea movie on a small budget. Dixon makes great use of what he’s got. In a couple pf scenes, the Guerillas engage US troops at night time and the scenes are extremely effective due to their staging and the use of nighttime Urban locales. The film portrays the streets of Chicago to be a convincing urban battleground.
Another exemplary aspect of the film is the soundtrack by Jazz legend Herbie Hancock. Beginning with the opening credits, which include an augmentation of his classic funk-fusion composition “Absolute Proof”, Hancock’s music provides an intense and groove-oriented pulse that cranks up the involvement every time his keyboard riffs fire up. His vamps at certain times alert the viewer that shit is about to go down, his background music to several key conversation scenes draws out an extended level of emotion from these particular scenes, and the emotions are not forced or manipulated , Hancock’s music brings an extra dimension of introspection.
As you could imagine. the original book version of the movie had to be published in England due to no known US publishing house would touch the subject. TSWSBTD has a well-written screenplay, it doesn’t waste many lines and intervenes with a sense of levity until it starts to come down the stretch and deliver a considerable amount of cathartic dialogue. Encapsulated with a series of jolting exchanges, the overwhelming tone of conversation between White characters is that of White Supremacy sound bites. The sound bites come off almost matter-of-fact, as if most Whites in positions of power believe in the conventions of White supremacist thinking to line up with their own Dictionary of common sense. During a scene involving key law enforcement figures discussing what to do after Freeman’s Guerilla fighters have begun performing acts of insurgency in the streets of Chicago, one official believes that it must be the Soviets behind this, because the official doesn’t believe that Black people could be this aggressively ambitious on their own.
In another scene, one of Freeman’s trainees complain that the resources they are using are too primitive, that Military grade acquisitions would be preferable. Freeman counters with two resonating thoughts: one is that purchase of Military grade materials would immediately draw the attention of the authorities to the purchaser of such resources (the Branch Davidians would certainly know that) and that people’s revolutions in places that were relevant at the time of this film such as Algeria and Vietnam had turned commonly used items into tools of resistance and rebellion without initial suspicion. Just as Freeman turns the racist Judo instructor’s energy against him, the film is filled with clever deception employed by Freeman’s Chicago Guerillas.
Having spent five years in the White-run CIA, Freeman is exposed to the haughty and patterned thinking of the Western Hemisphere, it totally dismisses the potential for subterfuge by non-Whites, it only fears other Whites. In one sequence, Freeman verbalizes that wealthy Whites can only see non-Whites as subservient. Freeman’s spies and operatives can go anywhere in Government and Corporate buildings for surveillance and psych-ops purposes as long as they appear to be janitors, service people or maids. America saw this kind of thinking play out in reality during the period of the 2000s and the reign of terror of the infamous DC sniper, an African-American sniper who shot and killed seventeen people and wounded ten before he was caught in a string of incidents. When the identity of the sniper was revealed, many in the media were surprised and shocked that the DC sniper was African-American due to the idea that many in the public had been trained subliminally and psychologically for years to believe that only White people were duplicitous enough to carry out such organized treachery.
Made over 50 years ago, “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” appears on the surface to be an incomplete sketch of a film, with low budget production values clouding the scope of large concept ideology. Upon closer inspection,. the film contains analogies about calling out America on it’s spoken but broken promises to all people, especially whose who have toiled in obscurity under the idea that America’s claims of merit-based rewards for hard work and integrity-filled living would be honored. The film has kindship and relevance to other great and important American paranoid thrillers like “The Parallax View”, “Flashpoint”, “Endangered Species”, “Medium Cool” and “Conspiracy Theory”, films where Americans have awakenings to the idea that their lives are being controlled by the same powers that be that claim all citizens are allowed to live a life of autonomous freedom. The creators of “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” encourage the idea of America to get it right for all people, not just educated and/or self-proclaimed individualist Whites and their sycophantic followers. If all avenues to a movement of benevolent equality fail or are blocked, then to the makers of “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” the only course of action remaining is by all means necessary.
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