The Spy Movie That Upset the American Dream

 “The Spook Who Sat by the Door,” a 1973 parable about institutional racism, was pulled from theaters after only a few weeks. The New York Film Festival is giving new life to the cult film.

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.

An added attraction at this year’s New York Film Festival (where the movie is available online through Wednesday), this much-mythologized bombshell was conceived in fury, born in flames and, on its 1973 release, advertised as America’s “nightmare.”

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.

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.

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.