Shaft (1971)
Who’s the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks?
When you watch the opening scene of Shaft, with the camera zooming in from the sky to the street and Isaac Hates’ infectious theme booming, you know right away that you are in for something different.
And that dynamite theme is not background music. Unlike movies before (and most now) you hear the vocals loud and clear. You know who Shaft is before Richard Roundtree delivers his first line. The city is alive - and it belongs to John Shaft.
The music isn’t the only thing that made Shaft something different.
While relatively tame by 2020 standards - in fact, drop three or four words and Shaft would probably receive a PG-13 rating today - it introduced moviegoers to a new reality in 1971: black militants could be heroes, interracial sex could be consensual, and you could have a detective movie with an African American lead. This was new and edgy. It was exciting for some. It was angering for others.
That was the idea.
But what is it about and is it any good?
The story was based on the 1970 novel by Ernest Tidyman (The French Connection and High Plains Drifter). It centers on (no big Spoiler) Private Detective John Shaft who (also no big spoiler if you look at the movie poster) gets sucked into a turf war between the Mafia and local Harlem mobsters. There is more, but we don’t want to get into spoilers that really do matter. Also, the truth is the storyline is pretty convoluted and trying to break it down in detail would probably take longer than watching the flick for yourself.
There are some really cool things in this movie.
Roundtree is…complicated. His angry act gets old - something some of the other characters call him on in the film - but when he let’s his guard down you can see a pretty interesting guy with a good sense of humor beneath the bluster.
One of the guys calling him out is Charles Cioffi, playing NYPD lieutenant and sometimes Shaft ally, Vic Androzzi. Cioffi and Roundtree have genuine chemistry. I’d watch a movie of the two of them talking about the price of fish in Philadelphia. A lot of their conversations echo in later Tarantino films, and I have to think they were an influence.
The other supporting guys range from good (Moses Gunn, with a handful of good one liners) to kind of just there (Christopher St. John), but all are ok.
And of course there is the music.
It is hard to beat Isaac Hayes and, as mentioned, they do some then unusual things, dropping full songs with lyrics in the middle of scenes. If you check out Django Unchained and other Tarantino movies you will see the exact same thing…it just happened here first.
On the other hand…
Like QT, I have a soft spot for a lot of the Blaxploitation films of the early 70s. They pushed the limits of what could appear in a movie, put a spotlight on some amazing talent that was previously ignored, and made films interesting and relevant to new audiences.
At the same time, they were at their core a marketing scheme by big studios to tap into urban markets. Nothing wrong with that, but I am a little ill at ease hearing Roundtree and other actors “speaking street black,” knowing that the words (of the screenplay and the original Shaft novel) were written by a white guy from Ohio with no life experience in the communities he was describing.
But hey, if it was ok with Richard Roundtree I can dig it.
You can catch ShaftHERE.
Four out of Five Bad ^0+#e>$!!!
🤜🏿🤜🏿🤜🏿🤜🏿
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