'THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR'..........MORE HERE THAN MEETS THE FBI.......

The Spook Who Sat By The Door (1973)    I normally break into an automatic eye-roll when it comes to conspiracy theories.......

              But I'm more than willing to believe that the CIA and FBI really did go all in on suppressing this film and getting it yanked out of theaters within a few weeks.......

              One viewing of this movie and all you want to ask is, How the hell did this movie even get financed, produced and actually booked in theaters?   In a country gripped between the jaws of Richard Nixon and Vietnam?

                Incendiary much?    How 'bout a story about an organized, fully armed Black Nationalist uprising across America, created by a black, ex-CIA agent...........

                 Unbeknownst to the clueless, idiotic, racist politicos and CIA suits who parked their token black (Lawrence Cook) at the reception desk (hence the film's title), he planned to used his training to recruit, and command  a revolutionary guerrilla army.......

                Nobody, but nobody, including audiences and theaters, knew what they were getting into with this film.  No quite the usual run-of-the-mill Blaxploitation.......

                Ah, but evidently the CIA got wind of it.......and the movie disappeared from view.

                Decades later, after resurfacing on DVD, it still has influenced. new generations of black filmmakers........

                But to be brutally honest.......even with its white-hot subject matter, (more current than ever in Trump's Make America White Again crusade)......the film fails badly in its execution......

                 Produced on a meager budget, it's slack, poorly paced and not particularly well acted, clumsily put together at every turn.....(even though edited by Michael Kahn, who eventually became Steven Spielberg's master film cutter )

                  If the film had been professionally crafted,, there's no telling how huge its cultural imprint might have been........but it so resembled a bottom-of-the-barrel 42nd Street Grindhouse
Blaxploitationer, it couldn't have made a dent in any political landscape.........it looked too much like an incredibly ambitious home movie.......

                   Still, it set the alarm bells off at the 1970's FBI, always on the hunt for dangerous, rabble rousing subversives........(you know, the ones asking for racial equality and an end to the Vietnam war.....)

                   Whatever anyone might think of their filmmaking, let's not close this post out without crediting director Ivan Dixon and writer Sam Greenlee.......it took an astounding amount of courage to create this film and somehow get it into the public eye, however briefly.

                  These guys should have studied films like "Battle Of Algiers"  and "Battleship Potemkin"......a cinematic call to arms only works......if you know how to use the power of cinema.

                   As a movie itself,  I'd scrape up 1 star for "The Spook Who Sat By The Door".......as a landmark cultural signpost that still exerts power,  4 stars (****)