that United Artists would not show the film in a way that would allow its political message to come through when clips were viewed prior to the film’s public release. "Dixon says when United Artists screened the finished product and saw a Panavision version of political Armageddon, they were stunned." It has been retrospectively suggested that the film "falls under the auspice of Blaxploitation but the political reality with which it dealt, that of Black militancy and anti establishment ideology, is an aspect that most films avoided in fear of commercial alienation and criticism from the white establishment. ...Ivan Dixon’s film seems to be a missing link between the work of Black filmmakers in the 1970s and the confrontational politics of a contemporary Black filmmaker like Spike Lee." Critical reception Film critics agree that The Spook Who Sat By the Door is a significant movie in that it presents a highly politically charged vision of black people, and according to PopMatters the film "remains one of the few uncompromised representations of black armed resistance in the United States." In a 2004 review for Philadelphia City Paper, Sam Adams recognizes the importance of Spooks questioning of politics and race in America, despite some other technical weaknesses. Adams writes: "the movie's sly polemicism has arguably aged better than the revolutionary rhetoric that inspired it", and notes that the conflict within Spook in its use of stereotypical imagery along with its revolutionary political message: "Hailed as a landmark and denounced as racist, 'The Spook Who Sat by the Door' is, at the very least, still worth arguing over." Similarly, Vincent Canby's 1973 review of the film for The New York Times notes the film’s use of stereotypes in order to convey the message at the heart of it: "The rage it projects is real, even though the means by which that rage is projected are stereotypes. Black as well as white". Canby also notes the difficulty he had with reviewing the film in that, although it is not technically impressive or innovative, its political and racial significance is not to be underestimated or dismissed. "...'The Spook Who Sat by the Door' is a difficult work to judge coherently. 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." According