A seminal moment in Black American cinema, Gordon Parks’ Shaft gave audiences something they hadn’t seen before: a strong Black action hero anchoring a mainstream Hollywood action movie. A huge financial success, Shaft proved that there was a large audience for (in Parks’ words), “a Saturday night fun picture which people go to see because they want to see the Black guy winning.”
Richard Roundtree beautifully embodies John Shaft, who is a variation on that longtime stock character, the jaded detective who works outside of the corrupt system to get results (think Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe). Except in this case, he’s Black. And he dominates every situation he’s in, whether it involves white cops, Black gangsters, or beautiful women. Shaft’s sartorial splendor—the well-trimmed moustache, plaid suits, turtlenecks and leather duster—are a reflection of the urbane Parks’ own wardrobe.
Parks was a long-established figure in the world of African-American arts and culture by the time he made Shaft. An eminent photographer, he was most famous for his diverse Life magazine assignments, which included Harlem gangs, Paris fashions, the Black Panther Movement (they offered him a job as minister of information; he declined), and New York high society. He had already made one film, The Learning Tree, and was excited at the prospect of making a movie that would appeal to Black culture, but also cross over into the mainstream.
Shaft is Parks’ love letter to New York, which is a grimy and glamorous co-star in the film. The fantastic opening scene of Shaft swaggering through the city—literally stopping traffic as he crosses a busy street—accompanied by Isaac Hayes’ iconic, wah-wah-infused score, is one of Manhattan’s great onscreen moments of the ’70s.
That amazing score, which accompanies Shaft throughout the film, was Oscar-nominated, and the theme song, still a soul classic more than 50 years later, won the Oscar for Best Song. It’s all well-deserved; rarely have images and music meshed so seamlessly as they do here.
As one of the two major films that started the Blaxploitation movement (Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song, released a few months earlier, is the other), Shaft retains all of its original charms while still being distinctly of its time.
Like Citizen Kane, it’s art that’s a lot of fun to watch.