Wow! my jaw is on the ground. What a revolutionary film and to know that this exists even now blows my mind. It's definitely a cinematic must regardless of how you feel about it cause this is just a giant crack in the form of cinematic platform of how to tell a story. Not so much on the emotional front like "Uptight" but as a procedural for a racial class war to take down a biased capitalistic society.
Sure it lacks the beauty of the aforementioned film but this tonally locks horns with it's budget and just fires tight bullet point material as we follow Dan Freeman(Lawrence Cook) as he gets recruited by the CIA... actually I'm just going to…

There are some movies that grab you the moment you read the plot summary, and this is one of them. Just the implication of its title and meaning, where basically for a while, these institutions used to hire a token Black man or woman who would be seated close to the office entrance so that people who came and went could see that the company was racially mixed, something that is immediately addressed on the film.

The film's technical accomplishments, more than the story, were what initially drew me to the movie. Director Ivan Dixon made an excellent job of capturing the camera work and aesthetics that would come to define films in the spy thrillers and thrillers of the…

Radical comes from the Latin radicula or “little root.” Given the often negative connotation of the word, many have been led to believe that social or political radicals are evil or immoral people. This is, of course, not necessarily the case.

When a system is deliberately corrupt, rancid down to its foundation, it’s not only imperative but urgent to become—in thought, speech, and actions—radical. And what’s the best way to do this? Get in below the ground floor, the lowest rhizomal substratum, which is exactly what protagonist Dan Freeman does here.

He, by way of an ingenious infiltration of the CIA—America’s longest and strongest arm of oppression and violence—takes what he has so astutely gathered in five+ years working there, undercover and…

"Well, like it or not, looks like we're integrated." - CIA Chief,
AND
"He's one of those quiet sorts of cats people don't fool with" - Dahomey,
AND
"Remember that a smiling black man is invisible" - Dan Freeman.

- Complex Top 50 Blaxploitation: boxd.it/1w5pa

Everyone listen up. We need to make sure that Donald Trump never sees or hears about this film from 1973.

As a group of 10 black men compete to be the first African-American CIA agent in history one man named Dan Freeman stands out, in part because of his "Uncle Tom qualities" (the film's words) that endear him to the white CIA agents. Secretly though, this dude Dan is planning a revolution with a target…

I’m remembering Angela Davis asking herself whether or not the Black Power movement had more to do with the total liberation of Black people or the sole liberation of the Black man. The Spook Who Sat by the Door most definitely falls into the latter camp, and as a film that stands solely on its political legs, falls rather flat for it.

Dixon attempts to liberate his characters from the weighted stereotypes of Blaxploitation while also operating within its framework to illustrate Black anger. It’s an attempt at subversion that doesn’t really work because it fails to address the dull hyper-masculinity that smothers the humanity in Blaxploitation—which, in turn, smothers the heart of the anger it seeks to invoke and…

The dialogue between violent and non-violent protest that seems to have been a focus on the late 60s/early 70s has been argued, in hindsight, to have been something of a false dichotomy by some. The basic idea is that both forms are necessary to spur change in our systems. I find that idea at least somewhat convincing, if a little (a lot) uncomfortable due to reasonably finding violence terrifying and disheartening on certain levels. (On another level, I understand the satisfaction in watching something burn.) Because it seems a reasonable enough stance, the arguments for and against on each side have become a little less interesting to me--it feels over and done with. All the same, this film's incredibly strong…

Fantastically engaging black liberation cinema. Praxis, philosophy, rhetoric, wish-fulfillment and the complexities of radicalism all seem to get equal treatment as the film revels in themes like CIA blowback, tokenism turned into a tool of subversion, and the final inevitable outcome of American white supremacy.

The movie manages a revolutionary fantasy narrative - its white people are stock racists with no attempt at humanizing them, as if in response to the near universally simple depiction of black Americans in the seventy years of movie history that preceded this. And yet, though very often a melodrama and a cartoon depiction of organizing movements, it still sets out to complicate its central character who, as he becomes a stand-in for the very…