movies (subject to tumblr's inconsistent search engine. for more complete results, try the archive): badlands, blow out, bring me the head of alfredo garcia, cadavres exquis, charley varrick, chinatown, dog day afternoon, il conformista, klute, le cercle rouge, marathon man, mean streets, night moves, point blank, prime cut, save the tiger, serpico, sisters, straight time, the day of the jackal, the don is dead, the driver, the friends of eddie coyle, the getaway, the harder they come, the hot rock, the killing of a chinese bookie, the last of sheila, the long goodbye, the mackintosh man, the onion field, the organization, the parallax view, the spook who sat by the door, the sting, the taking of pelham one two three, the yakuza, three days of the condor, villain, wanda
The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973)
I have trouble believing that in the ’70s the CIA would have only hired one black man, and that they would only have him working as a glorified receptionist. I doubt their racism was so petty as to not hire operatives to infiltrate the Black Panther Party and other Black Power organizations or, for that matter, resistance movements in Africa that weren’t friendly to American business interests. One of the biggest fault of this film is that it oversimplifies racism and its manifestations—as previously mentioned in the Times’ original review of the film. The role of black women in Spook was also pretty disappointing. How are you going to have a movement without any sisters? (One aspect Spook did manage to portray in a more nuanced manner was the struggle between blacks who sought to better themselves and the community by being an activist working within the existing system and those outlaws who sought to dismantle the system altogether—a struggle still relevant in equality movements today.) But despite this and any of the film’s technical shortcomings, its depiction of black armed resistance was still powerful enough to scare United Artists into quickly pulling Spook from theaters. It wasn’t until its 2004 release that film became widely available for viewing.
The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973)
I have a real tender spot in my heart for movies that portray the use of radio as a tool for liberation (see also Born in Flames, Pump Up the Volume). From now on, will we see our protagonists using Facebook and Twitter to call for revolution?
“Like Dan Greenlee’s novel, on which it is based, ‘The Spook Who Sat by the Door’ is a difficult work to judge coherently. It is such a mixture of passion, humor, hindsight, prophecy, prejudice and reaction that the fact that it’s not a very well-made movie, and is seldom convincing as melodrama, is almost beside the point.
The rage it projects is real, even though the means by which that rage is projected are stereotypes. Black as well as white.” -Vincent Canby in his 1973 NYT review of The Spook Who Sat by the Door
