![]() ![]() The longest scene in the movie, nearly at the center of it, features Dan in conversation with a fighter named Willie (David Lemieux), a college student and writer whom he recruits as “propagandist” and appoints Minister of Information. In effect, the question that the film poses regarding the revolutionary action of black Americans-and that renders it so daring-isn’t “Why?” but “Why not?” Rather, it’s about a cold, clear truth that infuses the movie with an existential ferocity: Dixon’s film doesn’t offer a litany of disparate grievances it displays the bedrock of racist attitudes and assumptions that renders racist policies both inescapable and irreparable. ![]() “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” isn’t about the ideological or organizational development of a political party it’s not about a public-relations war or an advocacy campaign. The power of what Dixon accomplishes is revealed as much in what’s not onscreen as in what is. Preston)-deliver a frank yet delicate reckoning with the pain and the conflict of black American lives. The sequences of their training, their planning, and their launching of action-as well as of Dan’s relations with other black men and women there, including his former fiancée, Joy (Janet League) a prostitute whom he recruits as an infiltrator (Paula Kelly) and a police detective who’s his longtime friend (J.A. But when he gets there, he returns to his earlier identity as Turk, a member of a gang called the Cobras, and he organizes and trains its members as part of his battalion-with lessons that he learned in C.I.A. When Dan leaves Washington, D.C., and returns to Chicago, he does so under the guise of joining a social-services group as a street-level teacher. ![]() Even in his office, the senator speaks in a pompous, stentorian voice seemingly inflated to a constant podium bluster.īy contrast, in the role of Dan Freeman, Cook is laser-focussed and controlled, keeping himself under high pressure to contain tremendous heat. A senator (a white man, played by Joseph Mascolo) campaigning for reëlection finds that he needs the black vote and decides to criticize the C.I.A. Dixon-who starred in one of the greatest of all independent films, Michael Roemer’s “ Nothing But a Man,” from 1964 (and then spent five years on “Hogan’s Heroes”)-begins with a tone bordering on sketch-like satire that soon crystallizes into a sharp edge of restrained precision. A supreme aspect of the art of movies is tone-the sensory climate of a movie, which depends on the style and mood of performance as much as the plot and the dialogue, the visual compositions as well as the locations, costumes, and décor, the editing and the music (often a sticking point), all of which are aligned with-and sharpen and focus-the ideas that the movie embodies. But the movie is also a distinctive and accomplished work of art, no mere artifact of the times but an enduring experience. On these grounds alone, a viewing of “The Spook Who Sat By the Door” would be a matter of urgent curiosity. ( No official documentation of these demands has emerged.) was involved in its disappearance, citing visits from agents to theatre owners who were told to pull the movie from screens. Its prints were destroyed the negative was stored under another title and Greenlee (who died in 2014) claimed that the F.B.I. The film’s radical premise was noticed outside of Hollywood: produced independently, the film was completed and released by United Artists, but it was pulled from theatres soon after its release. After leaving the agency, the agent, Dan Freeman (Lawrence Cook) moves to Chicago, and puts his training in guerrilla warfare to use: he organizes a group of black gang members and Vietnam War veterans into a fighting force and leads a violent uprising against the police, the National Guard, and the city government. Ivan Dixon’s 1973 film, “ The Spook Who Sat by the Door,” which is playing at Metrograph from Friday through Sunday (it’s also on DVD and streaming), is a political fiction, based on a novel by Sam Greenlee, about the first black man in the C.I.A. ![]()
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