The three stars of this entertaining action flick are:
1) Richard Roundtree as Shaft, your basic loner private eye, but one with so much sex appeal rolling off of him that I even found myself ignoring the plot of the film a few times so I could stare at him. Movie detectives don’t get cooler than this. He even walks across busy city streets without looking out for cars and director Gordon Parks doesn’t play it for laughs. Shaft owns the place, even Times Square, he wants you to know.
2) New York City in its grimy 70s glory.
3) The famous Isaac Hayes score, with funky wah-wah guitar smeared all over like syrup on a fat man’s pancakes.
This was a huge success in its day and it remains on the shortlist of the most famous of the old 70s blaxploitation films, even though it’s not very representative of the genre. It’s a rough and tough detective yarn. With some minor rewrites, Robert Mitchum could have starred in this in 1949. There are quick moments of racial tension here, but they never drive the story or motivate Shaft himself very much. The police seem willing to let him get away with murder and when Shaft joins forces with a group of militant black revolutionaries, he doesn’t appear to give a flip either way about their ideas—he just needs them as muscle on his big money case to rescue a gangster’s kidnapped daughter. The “pimps and drug dealers as heroes” thing would come up in other movies.
Gordon Parks, the only black director in the Hollywood mainstream at the time, wouldn’t involve himself further with the blaxploitation genre after this, though he would direct the film’s sequel, Shaft’s Big Score.
This is based on the novel by former journalist Ernest Tidyman, who also co-wrote the screenplay. Tidyman would go on to write six more books in the Shaft series, as well as the screenplays for The French Connection and High Plains Drifter.