Shaft

Another movie that TCM ran not too long ago that I hadn't blogged about before is Shaft, so I DVRed it and watched to do a full-length post on it.

Richard Roundtree plays John Shaft, a private detective going about his daily routine one day in New York City. He's known to the police, especially Lt. Androzzi (Charles Cioffi), who has a grudging respect for Shaft despite their racial differences at a time when there was still a lot of leftover racial tension from the 1960s. A couple of guys from the black organized crime community try to see Shaft, but it quickly turns into an attack and after one of the two falls through a window to his death, the other informs Shaft that crime boss Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn) wants to see Shaft.

You'd think they could have done it with a phone call, but whatever. Shaft goes to meet Bumpy, and it turns out that there's a big problem. Bumpy's daughter has been kidnapped, and he wants Shaft to find her. The reason it's a big problem is that the police are pretty certain the kidnapping was committed by white mafiosi who are in it for territorial purposes, although everybody else is going to believe it was for racial reasons. This especially after Shaft meets with some black liberation types led by Ben Buford (Christopher St. John) which results in a shootout.

Shaft is able to obtain the location where Bumpy's daughter is being held with a bit of help from the police, who let him question a couple of mafiosi who was surveilling him, but the first attempt to get the daughter goes wrong, with another shootout ensuing. Eventually, Shaft is going to have to team up with Ben and his subordinates to get the daughter's new location and perform a daring rescue.

As I was watching Shaft I couldn't help but think of any number of the white detective films -- both private eyes and police detectives -- that proceeded Shaft by a few years. Although Shaft is generally recognized as one of the earliest blaxploitation movies, I found myself reaching the conclusion that it really fits in well with films like Harper or Coogan's Bluff, or even Point Blank although I'm not certain it's ever really revealed what Lee Marvin's character does. Shaft is a well-crafted movie that has one foot in the blaxploitation genre, and the other in the detective genre, and could almost as easily be seen as a detective film that just happens to have a black protagonist.

Of course, I'm looking at Shaft nearly half a century after it was released. I'm sure audiences -- especially black audiences -- would have had a much different view of the movie back in 1971. And there are some things that separate it from the other movies, since it does deal pretty openly with issues of race. But the character portrayals and the violence are much more grounded in reality than the more fantastical depictions in later blaxploitation films, especially the ones with female protagonists.

Pluses in Shaft go to Roundtree's confident performance as the title character; the cinematography of early 1970s New York City, and the superb score from Isaac Hayes. If there is one minus, it would be the finale, which does strain credulity, with the movie also ending abruptly. But overall, Shaft is quite an entertaining little movie.

Shaft spawned sequels as well as multiple remakes including one earlier this year. If you want to see the original, it's on DVD, but just make certain you don't get one of the remakes.