The Spook Who Sat by the Door

In Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door, featuring music by Herbie Hancock, a white senator up for reelection hopes to curry favor with Black voters by creating a program to recruit African American agents into the CIA. The program, of course, is rigged to the point that none of the applicants have a chance of landing the job—except one. Dan Freeman (Lawrence Cook), an undercover Black nationalist who plans to take full advantage of his training by returning to his inner-city Chicago neighborhood to train a guerilla army to fight for liberation and freedom. Dixon is best known from his role on Hogan’s Heroes and in the 1964 indie film Nothing But a Man. Dixon’s daughter Doris Nomathandé Dixon joins Heather Linville of the Library of Congress for a conversation about the film and its preservation following the screening. (102 mins., 35mm)

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The Spook Who Sat by the Door, courtesy of Bokari Ltd.