New York Film Festival Gives New Life to 'The Spook Who Sat by the Door' - The New York... - 0 views
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There are movies whose back stories and reception histories are as compelling as the movies themselves. “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” is one.
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Directed by Ivan Dixon, “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” was adapted from a best-selling novel by Sam Greenlee that, according to its author, was rejected by nearly 40 American publishers before it was brought out by a British house in 1969.
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The novel was a thriller, but Greenlee — a veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service — used it as an exposé of institutional racism. “Spook” is both a racial slur and a slang term for spy; seated “by the door” suggests a person hired for show.
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Both the novel and the film, which Greenlee produced with Dixon, concern an apparently docile Black C.I.A. employee with the allegorical name Dan Freeman. Recruited as a public relations gesture, Freeman plays the long game, using what he has learned at the agency to mastermind an guerrilla war in Chicago.
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The movie is an analog to anti-imperialist films like “The Battle of Algiers,” albeit in the guise of a blaxploitation cheapster
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The white characters (mainly male authority figures) are fools, brutes, knaves and patronizing liars. The Black ones are also stereotyped but given greater depth. The movie suggests a live-action animated cartoon in which the whites have two dimensions and the Blacks have three.
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if “Spook” is a cartoon, it’s one animated by the ideas of the radical psychiatrist and champion of decolonization Frantz Fanon.
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Racial solidarity is the movie’s subject and the project’s DNA. Not only did Greenlee raise money from Black investors and get a fellow Chicagoan, Herbie Hancock, to write the score, he was able to use Gary, Ind., one of the first large American cities to elect a Black mayor, as a stand-in location for Chicago, thus enjoying the cooperation of the municipal authorities for powerful riot scenes.
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after three weeks in release, during which F.B.I. agents hounded exhibitors to pull the film, UA withdrew it from circulation, citing poor box office grosses.
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White America was spooked. The movie was blamed for serving as a Black Panthers textbook and for inspiring the Symbionese Liberation Army
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Historically, it can be bracketed with two earlier, highly successful independent productions — “Putney Swope,” a 1969 absurdist comedy by the white director Robert Downey in which an African-American takes charges of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, and “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” Melvin Van Peebles’s groundbreaking celebration of a Black outlaw,
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unlike “Swope,” “Spook” is something other than hip satire and, as opposed to “Sweetback,” it did not lend itself to recuperative commercialization.
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“Spook” may be a eulogy, but the most shocking thing about this unquiet movie is how relevant it remains.