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
