Film review

  • Shaft

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Gordon Parks (1971)

    Shaft isn’t a work of much imagination or artistry but you wouldn’t argue with its selection by the Library of Congress (in 2000) for preservation in the US National Film Registry – as a movie deemed ‘culturally, historically or aesthetically significant’.  This blaxpoitation picture had an African-American director and star but two of the white men involved link it to other famous detective films of the period.  Shaft is based on a 1970 novel of the same name by Ernest Tidyman, who adapted it for the screen with John F D Black:  Tidyman also wrote the script for another New York-set crime story of 1971, William Friedkin’s The French Connection.  Released three months after Shaft, Friedkin’s film, like Gordon Parks’s, gets plenty of grungy vitality from the New York City locations in which it was shot.  In Tidyman’s novel, the private detective John Shaft is white; on screen, he’s black, shrewd and self-possessed – a badass, maverick cousin of the immaculate, upstanding Detective Virgil Tibbs, played by Sidney Poitier in Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967).  The screenplay for that fine movie was by Stirling Silliphant, who executive-produced Shaft.

    In an exhilarating overture, Richard Roundtree’s title character strides around New York Streets, charismatic and entitled.  He’s accompanied by the opening credits and Isaac Hayes’s famous (Oscar-winning) ‘Theme from Shaft’ but Gordon Parks quickly makes clear that the protagonist is a decidedly independent operator, as well as a smooth one.  Shaft has connections and information that the city’s police are keen to share but he enjoys frustrating his main NYPD contact (Charles Cioffi, who played a key role in Klute – another strong 1971 crime movie).   The hero’s middle-class girlfriend (Gwenn Mitchell) owns her own boutique and apartment but not Shaft, who has sex with other women, white as well as black.  Although he tells one of them that ‘I got two problems, baby, I was born black and I was born poor’, the personally and sexually self-confident John Shaft is no one’s idea of disadvantaged.  He lives in a sleek bachelor pad.   He’s a distinctively sharp dresser – leather coat, check suits and sport jackets, turtleneck sweaters – yet he’s too canny to be a peacock.  Shaft is so cool that he keeps his spare gun in the icebox.

    Gordon Parks described Shaft as ‘a Saturday night fun picture which people go to see because they want to see the black guy winning’.  Shaft wins repeatedly, in black and white company, and the forces he confronts keep turning from adversaries into allies.  He sorts out a couple of black gangsters (in one case, lethally).  They’re members of a Harlem-based crime family, headed by Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn), whose daughter Marcy has been kidnapped.  Bumpy employs Shaft to secure her safe release.  At first, it seems Marcy’s kidnapping may be part of a New York race war and her abductors Ben Buford (Christopher St John) and his Lumumbas – a Black Panthers-inspired outfit.  It transpires that Marcy (Sherri Brewer) is being held captive by white Mafiosi:  Buford and the other brothers join forces with Shaft in a commando-style operation to free her.  This is Shaft’s climactic win.

    The story is set in the early months of 1971 in a New York City, which, after the film’s opening fanfare, is predominantly cold, cramped and dilapidated.  (One or two of the street scenes, as shot by Urs Furrer, almost anticipate Taxi Driver.)  Richard Roundtree, although a bit effortful when he’s doing forceful, is very good in Shaft’s more casual moments, and always magnetic.   The other acting is mostly broad and occasionally bad but the film is consistently entertaining – there’s plenty of mayhem but the register of this, in spite of the reality of the settings, is closer to the world of James Bond than to The French Connection.  I hadn’t seen Shaft before and I enjoyed it more in long retrospect than I think I might have done on its original release:  like some other things in BFI’s ‘Black Star’ season, it gains through being seen in a historical context.   A major commercial success, the picture spawned two film sequels (Shaft’s Big Score (1972) and Shaft in Africa (1973)), a TV series (1973-74) and a 2000 cinema reboot (starring Samuel L Jackson as the original hero’s nephew, John Shaft II).  Needless to say, none of the later movies has made it – not yet, anyway – into the National Film Registry canon.

    10 November 2016

  • No Way Out

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joseph L Mankiewicz (1950)

    Ashley Clark, programmer of BFI’s ‘Black Star’ season, gave a good and concise introduction to No Way Out.  He moved swiftly from a plug for ‘Black Star’ as a whole; to the podcast mini-series that forms part of the season, highlighting six black stars, including Sidney Poitier; to a few words about Joseph Mankiewicz’s film, in which Poitier made his (credited) screen debut.  It’s unusual for a present-day audience to need to be warned about offensive language in a Hollywood product of 1950 but Clark was right to flag this.  The racial epithets in No Way Out are startling not least because they’re heard in a variety of registers.  They’re not only spat out vengefully by the racist villain of the piece but also voiced casually and neutrally – if anything, more shockingly – by the powers-that-be at the city hospital where the Poitier character, Luther Brooks, has recently completed his training as a doctor.

    Although now qualified to practise medicine independently, Luther tells his mentor Dr Wharton (Stephen McNally) that he’d like to stay at the hospital for a further year, working as a junior resident there.  Two brothers, both shot in the leg by a policeman as they attempted a robbery, are brought to the hospital’s prison ward.  As Luther examines Johnny Biddle (Dick Paxton), the other brother, Ray (Richard Widmark), subjects the young doctor to racist abuse.  Luther is concerned by Johnny’s disorientation, suspects he may be suffering from a brain tumour and administers a spinal tap.  Johnny dies during the procedure.  Ray immediately blames Luther for his brother’s death.  Luther anxiously requests an autopsy to prove the accuracy of his diagnosis but state law dictates that an autopsy can’t be carried without the permission of the deceased’s family – permission which Ray Biddle refuses to give.

    From this point of the plot onwards, the movie develops into an unusual combination of conscientious racial drama and film noir.  You don’t automatically associate Joseph Mankiewicz with either genre (although he had directed thrillers early in his career) but No Way Out is taut, harsh and powerful.  The crime drama framework proves very effective as a means of containing the film’s moral conscience, which doesn’t obtrude the way it does in some of Stanley Kramer’s work, for example.  It’s remarkable that Mankiewicz made this picture in the same year as All About Eve (which was released two months after No Way Out).  The screenplay, which he co-wrote with Lesser Samuels, is well constructed and includes plenty of sharp dialogue.   There is a third criminal Biddle brother, the deaf mute George (Harry Bellaver), whose disability is very cleverly used:  in creating edgy moments when George and Ray communicate through sign language that others in their company can’t read; and in the plotting of the film’s climax.   Milton Krasner’s stark black-and-white photography and Alfred Newman’s dramatic score consistently enhance the strong narrative.

    On the day after America voted to make itself great again, No Way Out supplied a timely reminder of how great a blot racism was on the US landscape of the 1950s.  This comes through in the picture’s peripheral details and film-history context, as well as in its main themes.  Sidney Poitier has the main part but his name doesn’t appear until the second page of acting credits in the opening titles (and it’s not a separate ‘And introducing …’ billing).  He also had a leading role in the British-made adaptation of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country in 1951, but it wasn’t until five years after No Way Out that Poitier, in spite of the impact he made in Mankiewicz’s film, got his next significant Hollywood part, when, at the age of twenty-seven, he played a schoolkid in Blackboard Jungle.  It was another two years from that film to his starring role in Edge of the City.   Poitier is both excitingly dynamic and prideful as Luther Brooks – enough to obscure the condescending streak in No Way Out’s presentation of its African-American characters’ one-track nobility and simple domestic pleasures.

    Richard Widmark is erratic but he’s often convincing and goes deeper into Ray Biddle than might be expected.  So does Mankiewicz’s and Lesser Samuels’s writing of the role.  The Biddles come from the poor, white working-class area of the city and Ray is a man with a desperate need to hate.  Even when the autopsy is eventually carried out and vindicates Luther, Ray won’t – can’t – accept that the black doctor wasn’t to blame for his brother Johnny’s death.  Johnny’s widow is perhaps a bit too morally flee-floating in the story and Linda Darnell is a limited actress but both the character and the performance work well enough. Mildred Joanne Smith plays Luther’s wife Cora.  Amanda Randolph is excellent as Gladys, Dr Wharton’s housekeeper – a sequence involving her and Edie is one of the most volatile and, in its description of racial prejudice, incisive moments of the movie.    No Way Out is physically very well cast, down to the smallest roles.

    9 November 2016

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