Film Review: “The Spook Who Sat By The Door”

The 2024 Houston Cinema Arts Festival is presenting an array of narrative, documentary, and experimental film programs over 11 days in venues around the city. Among its special presentations is a rare screening of a provocative social satire and political polemic disguised as a thriller from 1973. The Spook Who Sat By The Door is an outlier in the history of Black independent cinema that hasn’t been seen or acknowledged enough since its stifled theatrical release more than 50 years ago. The festival’s upcoming presentation at The DeLuxe Theater on Tuesday, Nov. 12, at 7:30 pm is one of only a handful of special screenings in the country of the film’s new digital restoration, making this a very rare opportunity to see it at its best and also to gain insight from the women who are shepherding its legacy. Natiki Hope Pressley, daughter of writer Sam Greenlee, and Nomathandé Dixon, daughter of director Ivan Dixon, will be in attendance for a post-screening discussion. I had the pleasure of speaking in advance with both of these guests about the film’s making, their fathers, and their own efforts to bring this buried treasure to light.

Still image from “The Spook Who Sat By The Door” (1973)

The Spook Who Sat By The Door stars Lawrence Cook as Dan Freeman, who masters rigorous C.I.A. training in combat and espionage to become the agency’s first Black member, only to be given a token desk job. Freeman eventually leaves the agency to take his training back to the South Side of Chicago and lead the street gang the Cobras in a revolutionary new direction. “What we’ve got now is a colony. But what we want to create is a new nation.” The Spook is surprising in its turns — from funny to deadly serious, broad to sharply focused, controlled to chaotic. Its tightly composed visual style breaks for an unforgettable scene of handheld verité shooting. The film’s nervous system is its musical score — a raw, electric pulsing of funky grooves and disjointed sound textures by Herbie Hancock and his Mwandishi group, who were aggressively experimenting with musical forms and instrumentation at the time. Early in the film, an extended interlude of backwards-and-forwards drums establishes a tense tone of collaged contradictions.

The film is based on a book by Sam Greenlee, who himself had been one of the first Black foreign service officers in the United States Information Agency, serving on assignments in Iraq, Pakistan, and Indonesia in the late 1950s and 60s. On a visit home to the United States in 1965, he saw the outbreaks of inner-city riots as a harbinger of things to come and set out to write the story of a revolution as it might happen in the U.S. I asked Greenlee’s daughter Natiki Hope Pressley if she thought the book was autobiographical. “It was certainly driven by his own personal experiences. And I think Dan Freeman was created in his likeness. My father had a lot of swag, and he could fit in all environments. Dan was also a chameleon in the book and the movie — able to move between worlds.” She added, “It’s part of his brilliance and something I admire. My father was great at — my family coined the term “spook-ability” — being able to go into an environment and take all the things you need from it.”

Still image from “The Spook Who Sat By The Door” (1973)

Completed in 1966, the book was rejected by dozens of U.S. publishers before finally being published in 1969, first in the UK and then, following its success there, in the US and elsewhere. It was so “of its time” in ’69 that it’s easy to forget the book was written years earlier, just prior to the rapid escalation of unrest and the rise of the Black Power movement in the late 60s. By 1970, Greenlee had adapted his book into a screenplay with the help of Mel Clay, a former member of the experimental Living Theatre, and had met Ivan Dixon, an actor-turned-director who was enthusiastic about creating a film version.

Nomathandé Dixon told me of her father Ivan Dixon’s proudest artistic achievements. “There are two works that he treasured most. As an actor: Nothing But A Man. As a director: The Spook Who Sat By The Door.” In a long and rather accomplished career, it’s telling that his favorite projects were lesser-known but meaningful and organically created independent films — the former a 1964 drama about African American struggles in the South in which Dixon co-starred with Abbey Lincoln. He’d begun acting on the stage in the late 1950s, and by the early 60s was playing supporting roles in a number of films and television shows. His early theater and film projects with actor Sidney Poitier led to a lifelong friendship. (In our conversation, his daughter slipped into calling Poitier “Uncle Sidney”.) Dixon achieved fame as co-star of the sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, being one of the few Black actors in leading roles on television at the time. But he had aspirations to do more, and after reading Greenlee’s book he became determined to direct its film adaptation. He and Greenlee formed a partnership to make it happen, and so as not to compromise its bold critiques and messages of Black self-reliance, they began seeking support outside of the Hollywood studio system. But before that production got off the ground, Dixon proved his abilities and built his network by directing his first feature film, Trouble Man (1972).

Still image from “The Spook Who Sat By The Door” (1973)

Dixon and Greenlee knew The Spook Who Sat By The Door would be difficult to produce and would require a resourcefulness and subversion that mirrored the film’s plot. They spent more than a year raising a majority of the funding directly from individuals in the Black community — including lawyers, dentists, and restaurateurs — rather than entertainment industry entities. Late in the production, the movie studio United Artists agreed to put up completion funds, believing that they were backing a simple blaxploitation flick. The production was denied permits for shooting in Chicago, so the few scenes filmed there were done illegally, on the fly. A majority of the movie’s “Chicago” scenes were actually shot in Gary, Indiana, where Mayor Richard Hatcher had given them tremendous support. “That was instrumental,” Nomathandé Dixon told me. “It really could not have happened without a Black mayor, one of the first in a major city in the country, backing them and taking a huge risk.” Herbie Hancock, who had grown up in the same neighborhood as Greenlee and was a fan of the book, was contacted through a friend of a friend and agreed to contribute the music. Miraculously, shooting was completed in late 1972 and the editing was finished early in the following year.

Sam Greenlee and Ivan Dixon on the set of “The Spook Who Sat By The Door,” 1972

The movie was immensely popular in its opening week, but the theatrical release was suddenly cut short when all of the film prints vanished mysteriously — some say due to pressure from the F.B.I. This squashed its exposure, and would effectively bury the film for decades. But those involved in making The Spook were not altogether shocked by the intervention. Natiki Hope Pressley told me that her father Sam Greenlee had likely expected something like that to happen. “He knew that what he was communicating through this film was definitely going to be difficult for most of America to deal with. So, he had a sense that it could potentially be pulled, but he thought ‘let’s try to get it done and get as many people to see it as possible’.” Nomathandé Dixon echoed that, adding “Both Sam and my father, they didn’t have any regrets, because they both were willing to take the risk. They knew the risk, and they understood it.”

Though The Spook has gone largely unseen and is too rarely mentioned in the histories of independent, political, and African-American filmmaking of the era, its lore has kept it alive, if only on the margins of cult movie culture. In the years since their fathers’ deaths, Ms. Dixon and Ms. Pressley have worked together to restore, preserve, and provide access to the film. Its recent restoration was done through the Library of Congress, where the movie was entered into the National Film Registry of significant works in 2012. “One of our goals is to make sure people have an opportunity to see it on the large screen,” Nomathandé Dixon said. “And what a great experience to see it with people!” As we discussed the film’s original contexts and how younger contemporary audiences may take it, she related, “My father knew the power of the medium and getting the message out there. And he wanted this to be a thought-provoking film. You can come away with whatever you come away with. But at minimum, it makes you think about things.”

The Spook Who Sat By The Door (1973, Dir. Ivan Dixon, USA, 102 minutes) screens at the DeLuxe Theater on Tuesday, November 12, at 7:30 pm, with a post-screening discussion featuring guests Natiki Hope Pressley and Nomathandé Dixon, moderated by Gordon S. Williams of Lamar University.