I'm preordering this sucker today. And while I'm at it, I'll probably grab Drop Squad.
Now if only they'd release Cosmic Slop on DVD, we could start up the Angry Blackman Video Club.
A Story of Black Insurrection Too Strong for 1973
By PETER M. NICHOLS
Published: January 20, 2004
The Negroes are the trouble spot," a black aide tells a white senator who is behind in the polls in "The Spook Who Sat by the Door," Ivan Dixon's film about mounting a black insurrection in six American cities. Based on a provocative book by Sam Greenlee, "Spook" encountered plenty of trouble itself when it was released in 1973. The story goes that the government pressured the distributor, United Artists, to pull the movie from theaters. Facts are hard to come by, but "Spook" quickly disappeared, consigned to cult status and a murky life on bootleg video.
"I've been bootlegging it myself out of my shoulder bag," Mr. Greenlee said in an interview last week. That will no longer be necessary. On Jan. 27 "Spook," restored by Obsidian Home Entertainment, will be released on DVD.
Obsidian works to revive black films of particular interest. This one recalls the blaxploitation movies of the early 70's. (Gordon Parks Jr.'s "Superfly," a prime example, is available in a new edition from Warner.) But "Spook" had nothing in common with most films of that genre. "Nobody expected this kind of movie," said Tim Reid, the actor and director and founder of Obsidian. "They thought it was another nice little black vs. whitey story with girls and drinking. Instead there was this political drama."
On screen the senator decides to boost his standing with black voters by recommending that the C.I.A. appoint its first black agent, Dan Freeman (Lawrence Cook). After five years in menial positions, Freeman quits and takes what he has learned about terrorist tactics back to Chicago, where he starts to put together a guerrilla operation.
Shot on a bare-bones budget, "Spook" is as much street scramble as revolution, but it has some interesting pointers: in guerrilla warfare, not losing is winning; keep to basics (or, as Mr. Greenlee puts it in the screenplay he wrote with Melvin Clay, sleep on the floor and you won't fall out of bed).
" `The Spook Who Sat by the Door' is a difficult work to judge coherently," Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times. "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 is real, Canby continued, even if the characters and situation are not very believable. The book, published in 1969, worked more expansively. In an interview this week, Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the African-American studies department at Harvard, said that he had not seen the film but had read the novel while he was an undergraduate at Yale.
"It was a cult book for us because we all wanted to be spooks who sat by the door," he said. "We all wanted to be inside the system, integrated into the historically elite white institutions of America, transforming them from inside."
Mr. Greenlee, 73, said that he showed only action scenes to United Artists, which agreed to distribute the film thinking it would be the usual blaxploitation fare. "When they saw the final cut, they went up the wall," he said.
The plan was to shoot the movie in Chicago. "The mayor had read the book, or part of it, and hated it," Mr. Dixon said, referring to Richard J. Daley. Lacking permissions, the production moved to Gary, Ind.
Mr. Dixon, 73, was primarily a television director ("The Waltons, "The Rockford Files," "Quincy") and actor (Sergeant Kinchloe in "Hogan's Heroes"). Last week he said that "Spook" was only trying to show black anger, not suggest armed revolt as a credible step.
Mr. Greenlee described his own intention. "I wrote it as a training manual so that people would do it right," he said. Among those who didn't, he added, were the Black Panthers. "Their mistake was not going beyond being armed propagandists," he said. "Had they gone underground, they might have maintained themselves." Distributed by Monarch. $19.95. 102 minutes.
Posted by P6 at January 20, 2004 06:44 AM
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Comments
The only DVD I've ever pre-ordered was UHF. I wonder what that means?
Posted by Phelps at January 20, 2004 06:02 PM