"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."
| Peter M. Nichols' New York Times article "A Story of Black Insurrection Too Strong for 1973" has probably caused a thousand requests to bloom on wishlists all over the Web
posted in articles on January 20, 2004 6:21 AM | t (0)
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