Movie Rec

On July 4th, I watched The Spook Who Sat By The Door, a fitting movie for the holiday. It’s a 1973 action flick, directed by Ivan Dixon and based on a novel by Sam Greenlee, about Black nationalist guerrillas. The hero of the movie, Dan Freeman, is recruited by the C.I.A. in a token "integration" program as its first Black agent. After Freeman spends five years on xerox duty, he quits the agency, leaves for Chicago’s inner city and organizes a guerrilla army to fight for liberation. Government pressure forced the distributor to pull the film after only a few weeks in theaters. For a long time, before it was released on DVD in 2004, it could be seen only on bootleg video.

While the story behind the movie is interesting as an exposure of the nature of bourgeois democracy and the myth of the “free marketplace of ideas,” its political content is even more so. While the film might be dismissed by some as entertainment, and not a serious treatment of the struggle to end racist oppression, the powers-that-be apparently didn’t feel the same way.

The main shortcoming of the movie is the absence of women in the armed struggle. All of the guerrillas are men. Women have significant roles only as Freeman’s love interests. Since the film makes a direct reference to Vietnam’s war for national liberation, it’s appropriate to mention that Ho Chi Minh described the participation of women as the powerhouse of that war. It’s still far from the r.c. stand on the centrality of women’s emancipation (captured in the two Maoist slogans: “women hold up half the sky” and “break the chains--unleash the fury of women as a mighty force for revolution”), but The Battle of Algiers, a film depicting a real national liberation struggle, was much more progressive on this.

The film has shortcomings on other political issues: armed reformism vs. all-the-way revolution, focoism vs. people’s war, nationalism vs. revolutionary communism. Nevertheless, it is an interesting flick and a powerful statement against oppression. It’s also rated PG. Good for the kids.