Name: The Spook Who Sat by the Door
Genre: Blaxploitation
Released: 1973
Duration: 102 min

The Spook Who Sat by the Door

The most political film the blaxploitation boom made, pulled from cinemas and buried for thirty years.

Adapted from Sam Greenlee's novel, it follows the first Black man recruited into the CIA as a public-relations token, who quietly banks everything they teach him and takes it home to Chicago to turn a street gang into a trained guerrilla army. Ivan Dixon directs it cold and patient, with a Herbie Hancock score, and it means every word of what it is arguing. Less a blaxploitation thriller than an insurgency manual with a body count, and it plays like one.

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Written about

Blaxploitation, 1971 to 1975
Melvin Van Peebles caught gonorrhea on his own set, filed a workers' comp claim, and bought more film stock with the settlement. Four years later the studios had mined the audience out and moved on.

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