The actor-director Ivan Dixon has died at the age of 76. As an actor, Dixon appeared in A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway and served as Sidney Poitier's stunt double in The Defiant Ones; he also starred in the 1964 Nothing but a Man, an early example of an indie drama with a predominantly African-American cast, which was to become one of the first films selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry. He probably became best known, though, as a regular cast member of the wacky-antics-in-a-World-War-II-P.O.W.-camp sitcom, Hogan's Heroes. That series ran from 1965 to 1970; after it went off the air, Dixon continued to act — he was especially impressive in the 1976 ensemble comedy Car Wash — but he mostly concentrated on directing. His first film as a director was the 1972 blaxsploitation movie Trouble Man, a Shaft knockoff starring Robert Hooks that's best remembered for its theme song, a hit for its composer-singer Marvin Gaye.
But Dixon's second theatrical feature was something else: The Spook Who Sat by the Door, a 1973 adaptation of Sam Greenlee's novel about a token black CIA agent (Lawrence Cook) who, having mastered the counter-insurgency tactics of guerrilla warfare and other violent skills he learns from the Company, proceeds to apply them to street warfare aimed at toppling the racist white Establishment. Ragged in places, partly because Dixon clearly had to work around an inadequate budget, the movie has a crazy charge to it that it marks it as an engaged movie of the early '70s. Dixon would charge that the studio that financed it, United Artists, freaked out when it belatedly realized what it had on its hands, and buried the picture, as much out of political concerns as lack of faith in its box office potential. The Spook would be Dixon's last movie as a director; he spent the rest of his career working in TV. But The Spook developed a fervent cult following over the years, even among people who hadn't seen it, in part because of rumors that it had been "suppressed" for its revolutionary message. It finally got dusted off and released on DVD in 2004.