| Chris Polley |
The Spook that Sat by the Door plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, September 26th, through Sunday, September 28th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
The early 70s were, in many ways, rife with watershed moments in Black history: Charles Gordone became the first Black playwright to win a Pulitzer prize, Rep. Shirley Chisolm helped form the Congressional Black Caucus, and Thomas Bradley became the first Black mayor of Los Angeles—the second biggest city in America. The same period of time, of course, also saw the continuance of racially motivated tragedies: the Jackson State killings, the Attica prison riot, and the Sanctified Hill disaster. As anyone with a modicum of empathy and common sense knows, too, the fight for true equity and Black freedom continues to this day. One of the most powerful displays of Black excellence in the arts also coincided with this aforementioned conflicted era: Ivan Dixon’s screen adaptation of Sam Greenlee’s novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door. Over 50 years later, though, still not enough people have seen it, and its relevance has only marinated and perhaps even become more potent.
The story follows Dan Freeman (played with stentorian force by Lawrence Cook), the fictional first Black hire at the CIA, who after many years working under the thumb of the federal government, realizes tokenism will only elevate him so far (hence the title of the film). What he does with his life next isn’t unlike what Dixon saw as a necessary way of living as an artist. “He never wanted to work for anybody or have to check in with anyone,” the actor-director’s daughter Natiki Pressley said in an interview with Screen Slate last year. “For him, that was success and some level of freedom, not fully, but it’s an expression of not being able to be restrained or have to be defined by someone else’s perception.” Freeman decides to take the future of Black liberation into his own hands, moving back to his hometown of Chicago to use his knowledge of guerilla warfare and propaganda tactics to organize Black resistance fighters against the white authorities.
Dixon’s ideologically radical but narratively taut tale became immediately stonewalled in its production, leading to funding and permit issues, including in Chicago under the strict white rule of Mayor Richard J. Daly, which meant much of the filming was to be moved to Gary, Indiana. “Richard G. Hatcher, the city’s first Black mayor, gave Dixon carte blanche,” Robert Daniels reported for RogerEbert.com. “He offered the director a couple of city blocks and other resources to shoot many of the film’s most impressive set pieces.” And how impressive these battle scenes are, suggesting at once the brutal brawls of John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 and the large-scale chaos of Alex Garland’s Civil War. The sheer amount of collective coordination this must have taken is awe-inspiring to see still in 2025, especially in what was essentially an independent film with a shoestring budget—and one that is unapologetically aimed at almost solely Black audiences.
This, however, was what seemed to fuel Dixon, and really, what fuels so much vital art, especially in the hands and minds of the hungry and angry: the notion that, all capitalist logic be damned, this story must be told and put to celluloid. But while the righteous indignation is loud and clear in every frame of Spook, there is also a remarkable sense of collaboration too: including editor Michael Kahn (who would go on to cut Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jurassic Park) masterfully getting the most economic bang for the proverbial buck and jazz great Herbie Hancock composing some of the most intense, visceral grooves to soundtrack an uprising. “There was a sense of, what if we took destiny into our own hands,” legendary Black actor-director Robert Townsend said in an introduction to the film available on its 2004 DVD release, according to PopMatters. “Now there are no communities. This film is about a sense of community.”
Spook, perhaps more so than any other Black-directed film of its time, also had intersectionality at the forefront, proving its authenticity as a communal work. Paula Kelly and Janet League play competing love interests for Freeman but are both portrayed with dignity, intelligence, and identified as equally important to the movement as their male counterparts. And one of the most notable supporting characters is a surprising but welcome one—David Lemieux plays Pretty Willie, a light-skinned revolutionary who uses his ability to pass as white to the group’s advantage. “It’s nice to see a Black character that’s my complexion that’s not a tragic mulatto,” Lemieux said at a Q&A after a screening of Spook at Chicago State University in 2018. “I always tell people that I’m mixed, but I’m not mixed up.” There’s one particular scene between Willie and Freeman that’s so explosive and raw that it becomes clear to the viewer that while the film is a work of fiction, the emotions are indeed based in fact.
Even the New York Times’s Vincent Canby acknowledged upon Spook’s release in 1973 that despite the movie’s low-budget qualities, its thesis felt real and significant. “[There] was always this fear that something would instigate Black people to finally rise up and take arms and declare war against the white man,” Black Panther historian and author David F. Walker said in an interview with KPBS in reference to Spook, which he called his favorite book and movie. “And that’s been this fear, this white fear in America since before America was America, when it was still part of the British colonies. And I think that that terrifies people so much, and especially when it’s placed in a context of, oh, yeah, they’re justified.” Of course, white America would go on to see this in various ways in the coming years, from the rise of socially conscious rappers like N.W.A. and Public Enemy in the 1980s to the vitriolic writing and reporting of Ta-Nehisi Coates in the wake of multiple police killings of unarmed Black Americans in the 2010s.
There’s no time like the present to go back to Dixon’s masterpiece of provocation to feel the urgency of the fight again, even as racial violence both literal and figurative remains a cornerstone of society in the U.S. “Though in hindsight Spook’s assertion of the immediate possibility of armed revolution might seem a somewhat naive fantasy of resistance that could never have played out in an American context, at the time it was a theorized and commanding vision enough for the LA Times’s Kevin Thomas to call the film ‘one of the most terrifying movies ever made,’” Michael T. Martin and David C. Wall wrote in their essay for the Library of Congress when the film was added to the registry in 2012. Yes, the means projected on screen is a fantasy, but the feelings are real, and so is the thirst for change—both past and present.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon