T he Spook Who Sat By the Door (1973) is a pipe bomb on the video store shelf, a gasoline-filled wine bottle in your DVD cabinet, a vicious bit of malware streamed through hijacked plutocrat satellites. The first time you see it, you simultaneously can’t believe you’d never heard of it before and can’t believe anyone ever heard of it in the first place. By all accounts, the FBI did their best to stop that. For years it was a lost film, although calling it ‘lost’ would be like describing Jimmy Hoffa’s body as ‘misplaced.’ When the actor Tim Reid unearthed a print in a vault in 2004, stored under a different title, he told the Chicago Tribune, “When they want to lose something, they lose it.” The movie is not just pro-revolution, it’s proscriptive. It’s as much manual as manifesto. And it all works so brilliantly because it uses expectation—of the white ruling class, of law enforcement, and even of you, the savvy moviegoer—as its weapon of choice.
The film, based on a novel by Sam Greenlee, sets viewers up from the jump with its title, and not just with its wry, slangy wordplay. It evokes John le Carré, the author of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, and of course that other famous fictional spymaster, Ian Fleming, he of The Spy Who Loved Me. Fleming’s famous secret agent gets name-checked in the opening scene of The Spook Who Sat By the Door, when a political consultant weighing the merits of recruiting the first Black CIA agent says it out loud: “Whoever they select will be the best-known spy since 007.”
This is the film’s first act of cinematic subterfuge. In that opening scene, a senator faced with a declining electoral fortune considers a proposal to bolster his credit with Black voters, whose support he already presumed he deserved. (“I’m the best friend those people have in Washington!” he says—to his Black campaign consultant, no less.) The plan is pure political stunt. He’ll make a public show of insisting that the CIA diversify their workforce by seeking out Black recruits.
It’s easy to think you know where this is all headed, especially given Herbie Hancock’s jazzy, synth-swept score, which has echoes of a Bond theme. One superior candidate will emerge, the CIA will try to stifle him, and he will nevertheless embark on a mission where he proves his ability. The elevator pitch writes itself: Blaxploitation Bond. Superspy Shaft. Surely you can dig it.
And one recruit does indeed emerge from the rigorous training program. Dan Freeman (Lawrence Cook) stands apart from the trainees in nearly every way. We’re told he’s the highest achiever on all the physical and cognitive tests, but his uniqueness is evident from Cook’s terrific performance alone. His hooded eyes and perfectly still poker face defy the understanding of his fellow candidates—and the audience, as well. He wears a sharp, understated suit and keeps himself apart from the other chummy recruits, always coolly observing. Freeman almost never misrepresents himself when he speaks, yet he maintains an air of inscrutability, thanks in large part to the charismatic Cook’s tightly controlled performance..
When Freeman confounds expectations and earns a job in the CIA, he’s shunted into a windowless office and made Top Secret Reproduction Center Section Chief. Which is to say, he’s in charge of the copy machine, the agency’s token diversity requirements having been satisfied. So Freeman quits, opting to return to work as a social worker on the South Side of Chicago. But now he has a plan, one he directly states to his CIA boss, who is too comfortable in his assumptions to actually hear it.
“I’ve decided to take this position with the social service foundation and help my people help themselves,” Freeman says. “Use what I’ve learned here.”
Freeman is true to his word, and definitely not in the way his former employers anticipated. He returns to Chicago and begins rallying troops, convincing local gangs to consolidate their power in preparation for his “war of liberation.” They will infiltrate white society and lay the groundwork for a coordinated attack that will force the authorities to listen to their demands for true equality. Their most essential weapon will be the element of surprise, utilizing the ignorant assumption that the Black working class isn’t capable of organized resistance.
“Remember,” Freeman tells his growing squadron of troops, “a Black man with a mop, tray, or a broom in his hand can go damn near anywhere in this country, and a smiling Black man is invisible.”
It’s a nifty inversion of the dynamic Saul Alinsky writes about in Rules For Radicals. Alinsky’s first rule is, “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.” Also, what they think you don’t have, Freeman might add.
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From here on, The Spook Who Sat By the Door plays not just like a call for revolution, but an instruction manual on how to do it. The unflappable Freeman doles out philosophical wisdom to cadre of soldiers, along with the kind of practical advice that pre-dates The Anarchist’s Cookbook. When his right-hand man Willie (David Lemieux) grouses about the bomb-making seminars being like high school chemistry class, Freeman explains why it’s better to make rather than build your own explosives:
“Everything on this table can be obtained easily from a drug store, a hardware store, or a medical supply house. If we can get sophisticated equipment we’ll use it, but we don’t rely on it. We live off the land. We match technology with spontaneity and improvisation. Men against machines, braves against computers. If you don’t think it can work, check out Algeria, Kenya, Korea, and the the ‘Nam. Can you dig it?”
At every turn, Freeman wields his enemies’ ignorance and expectations like a dagger. The authorities don’t even know where to start looking, since they presume the leader of the resistance must be some white communist. To further play into that misnomer, Freeman orchestrates heists carried out by his lightest-skinned comrades, who wear wigs and white-coded clothes, sending the police off on a wild (white) goose chase.
It’s fairly stunning to watch Freeman’s Black Nationalist freedom fighters—nicknamed The Cobras—stage raids to build up their arsenal, blow up the mayor’s office, dose the head of the National Guard with LSD, and wage open war against police and guardsmen on the streets of Chicago. The seasoned moviegoer no doubt anticipates, or perhaps even dreads, the moment when Freeman’s college girlfriend, Joy (Janet League), or his police officer pal Dawson (J.A. Preston), inevitably coerce him into a change of heart, or perhaps foil his plot from the inside. They certainly try. But at the exact moment when most American movies would flinch, The Spook Who Sat By the Door proceeds boldly forward, and the explosive conclusion is more akin to a startling new beginning.
Conservative viewers would no doubt label The Spook Who Sat By the Door as anti-American. From a purely cinematic perspective, it is very much un-American, in the sense that there are vanishingly few American movies about modern revolution. There’s an entire pantheon of films about American decay—the faux utopias of Logan’s Run and Gattaca, the sci-fi hellscapes of Blade Runner, Soylent Green, and The Terminator, the YA dystopias of Hunger Games and its imitators. We can imagine America—sometimes along with the world at large—being invaded by aliens, smashed by an asteroid, spun off its axis, or even instantaneously frozen by some seriously hyperbolic forecasting (hello there, The Day After Tomorrow). But actual revolution? That’s crazy talk.
You can count the number of pro-revolutionary American movies on one hand and still have a middle finger reserved for ICE. Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool certainly qualifies, as Robert Forster’s journalist comes to see the futility of his faux-objectivity during a melee staged amid the actual ‘68 riots in Chicago. Lizzie Borden’s Born In Flames (1983) is the feminist counterpart to Spook Who Sat By the Door; it’s fascinating but at times frustratingly didactic, with an awful lot of academic arguing about the most effective language for argument. More recently, One Battle After Another took up the mantle, and Alex Garland’s Civil War engages with those ideas, albeit with an almost active disinterest in political coherence. The fantastic How To Blow Up A Pipeline was thoughtful yet radical in its advocacy for anti-capitalist sabotage.
That list might not quite be exhaustive, but it’s pretty damn short, especially considering that there have been 25 Bond movies.
The Spook Who Sat By the Door is also part of a legacy of Black revolutionary movies following the rise of the Black Panthers and the murder of Fred Hampton, as more recently explored in Judas and the Black Messiah (2021). Spook Who Sat By the Door was preceded in 1972 by the Billy Dee Williams-produced The Final Comedown, which has a similar plot of urban revolt but a far more conventional conclusion, where Williams’ revolutionary is shown the error of his ways and punished for his actions (they even shoot his mama down!). It was followed in 1975 by the bumblingly incendiary Black Gestapo, co-starring a young Charles Robinson (Night Court’s Mac). Despite its provocative title and questionable use of Nazi archive footage in the opening, it’s ultimately the luridly distractible exploitation movie you might think you’re getting when you press play on The Spook Who Sat By the Door.
Perhaps the next most nakedly pro-revolution mainstream American movie is Conquest Of the Planet Of the Apes (1972). Even when abstracted by a sci-fi metaphor, though, an American movie has to pull its punches. In the otherwise impressively gritty Conquest, the pleas of a peace-loving girlfriend cause the anti-authoritarian hero to stop short his violent insurrection. It’s worth noting that in director J. Lee Thompson’s original cut, ape leader Caesar kills the opposition leader to begin his revolution. When test audiences reacted poorly, it was recut to show Caesar sparing the villain and decreeing that the apes will rule—but they will rule with mercy.
That fortitude, to literally stick to its guns at the conclusion, is what makes The Spook Who Sat By the Door unique, and perhaps uniquely objectionable to the powers that be.
The least surprising element of The Spook Who Sat By the Door was the mainstream reaction to it. Author Sam Greenlee, who was one of the first Black agents in the United States Foreign Service and wrote the novel on which the movie is based, saw his book rejected 40 times before it was eventually picked up by a British publisher in 1969. Greenlee collaborated with director Ivan Dixon, perhaps best known as an actor on the sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, to make the film adaptation a few years later, with distribution from United Artists and its $1 million budget largely supplied from grassroots investors in the Black community. Major Richard Daly refused to allow Dixon to shoot in Chicago—he filmed the uprising sequences in nearby Gary, Indiana—and then, despite its early success screening around Chicago, theaters began to shorten their runs. Greenlee told the University of Chicago that the manager of the McVickers Theater in the Chicago Loop said FBI agents had encouraged him, in person, to stop running the film.
“They would sit the exhibitor down and gently tell him that this film was dangerous and could cause all kinds of difficulties,” Greenlee said, adding that he heard rumors United Artists was discouraged from wider distribution. That account is supported in the documentary Infiltrating Hollywood: The Rise and Fall Of The Spook Who Sat By the Door (2011). Documentarian Christine Acham told the Chicago Tribune that she had eventually received a copy of Greenlee’s FBI file, only to discover that it was still heavily redacted.
The Spook Who Sat By the Door remained largely unseen for decades, outside of bootlegged VHS tapes. It finally gained the cult status it deserves when actor Tim Reid unearthed another print in 2004—and it’s no less powerful in 2025 than it was in 2004, or 1973. It might actually be more stunning in retrospect, now that masked soldiers are terrorizing people of color on the streets of Chicago.
Freeman’s savvy manipulation of expectations is beautifully mirrored by Greenlee and Dixon’s approach to storytelling and filmmaking. Freeman utilizes assumptions at every turn—from the senator’s belief that he can gin up Black support with a PR move, the CIA’s doubts that their trainee could use his new skills for a greater purpose, and law enforcement’s certainty that the commies are secretly behind any unrest. Greenlee and Dixon tease the promise of a Blaxploitation potboiler only to rally their audience with a call to arms. You strike when and where they least expect it. And that’s when you hit ‘em where it hurts.
