Shaft (1971)

 

The opening sequence of Shaft clearly establishes Richard Roundtree as a star and his character John Shaft as the fascinating central focus of our attention. Clad in a brown leather trench coat and walking with a determined swagger, Roundtree’s Shaft emerges from the subway and walks through Times Square under movie marquees featuring films with white actors. Director Gordon Parks slyly inserts Shaft into movie history here by proclaiming in the opening sequence that, yes, this is a movie with a black lead character, and it’s going to be a different kind of film from those on the screens in New York City in the early 1970s. It certainly helps to have Isaac Hayes’s percolating “Theme from Shaft” to underscore Roundtree’s walk, a welcome musical and lyrical introduction to the film and the character. John Shaft is a private detective who’s hired by crime boss Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn, almost Shakespearean in his venality) to find his kidnapped daughter, this despite attempts by a couple of Bumpy’s men to kill Shaft earlier in the film. At Bumpy’s suggestion, Shaft unites with Ben Buford (Christopher St. John, father of actor Kristoff St. John, who was almost as stunningly good looking as his dad), a leader of a black “militant” group similar to the Black Panthers, to find Bumpy’s daughter. (Every group who wanted equal rights at the time was labeled “militant,” it seems.) It turns out that the Mafia have taken the girl, and according to Shaft’s friend in the NYPD, Lt. Vic Androzzi (Charles Cioffi), the tensions between the two criminal groups from opposite ends of the city are threatening to start a race war. The reasons behind this impending war are perhaps a bit murky, but it’s not those details that make this an exciting film. It’s the action, and Shaft has lots of gunfire and fighting and what must have been pretty violent stuff for the time period. The film also features some very interesting moments involving race relations, and many of them feature some sly humor. For example, when Lt. Androzzi holds up a black pen to Shaft’s face and says, “What is it with this black shit, huh? You ain’t so black,” Shaft holds up a white coffee mug to Androzzi and responds, “You ain’t so white either, baby.” The location shooting in New York lends the film a sense of authenticity, down to the unexpected real protest against the New York Times that Parks managed to capture for the opening sequence, and the numerous supporting characters, such as the many informants (like Antonio Fargas before Car Wash and the TV series Starsky & Hutch), keep the plot moving briskly. The few women in the movie are only incidental to the plot; they’re primarily there as objects for Shaft, who has sex with a couple of different women, never professing emotional attachments to any of them. Of course, James Bond was bedding multiple women in every 007 movie at the same time, but it must have been (and still must be) a surprise for some viewers to see a black male lead character engaging in the same behavior. Movies like Shaft don’t often get recognized for their award-worthy costume design, but even though it might not be a very practical outfit for taking down the Mafia, Shaft looks damn good in the black leather he wears for the latter part of the movie. The film is oddly progressive for when it was made. As an example, I would point out that when Shaft is looking for a couple of Mafiosos in a Greenwich Village bar, there’s a bit of witty interchange or banter between him and a gay bartender. I’d almost characterize it as playful, making this one of the few movies of its time that didn’t traffic in homophobic attitudes towards its gay characters. In a sly nod to other directors like Hitchcock who made brief appearances in their own films, Gordon Parks managed to cast himself in a cameo role as a landlord. It’s a fun moment in a film that holds up well overall despite some of the dated slang that the characters use at times. Shaft was so successful that it spawned two sequels, a sequel/reboot, and another sequel/reboot, all of them grounded in the original mythology of the 1971 film and all of them starring or featuring Roundtree. Oscar Trivia Note: Isaac Hayes was the first African American to win an Oscar for Best Original Song (for the theme song) and only the third African American to win an Oscar in any category (after Hattie McDaniel and Sidney Poitier).

Oscar Win: Best Original Song (“Theme from ‘Shaft’”)

Other Oscar Nomination: Best Original Dramatic Score