Shaft (1971)
Before Shaft is anything else, it is that theme. Isaac Hayes's wah-wah-drenched, Oscar-winning title track, playing over John Shaft striding through the streets of early-seventies New York, is one of the great movie openings in the history of cinema, so effortlessly cool that the film spends the next ninety minutes trying to live up to it. I'll be honest: nothing in the ninety minutes that follow quite matches those first few seconds. That is not a complaint, exactly. It is just the truth.
Gordon Parks's 1971 landmark is the picture that, alongside Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song from the same year, effectively kicked the blaxploitation era into gear. Richard Roundtree stars as Shaft, a slick, unflappable Harlem private eye hired to track down a crime boss's kidnapped daughter. The setup is pure pulp, and Parks plays it that way, leaning hard into the swagger and the style of that particular New York moment.
And, well, you pretty much know what you are in for. The dialogue is cheesy, the delivery cheesier still, and the action is gloriously outlandish in that only-in-the-seventies way that I find genuinely difficult to resist. Roundtree, who would go on to become synonymous with the role across a run of much worse sequels, has real, easy charisma. He wears the part like a second skin. You believe him completely, not because the script asks much of him in the way of depth, but because he carries himself with the kind of confidence that makes you want to keep watching regardless. There is fun to be had among the supporting cast too, including Christopher St. John as a Black militant leader. I actually last came across St. John headlining his own film in Top of the Heap (1972), a much stranger, more personal picture than this one. Here he is used well enough, though the film never quite knows what to do with the political undercurrent his character represents.
That is, I think, where Shaft shows its limits. It gestures at something more interesting than a straightforward private eye caper, a tension between Black identity, institutional racism and street-level power, but it never really commits to the argument. It raises the ideas, lets them simmer briefly, then gets back to the action. None of it is remotely deep, but then it is not trying to be, and there is something almost refreshing about a film that knows exactly what it is and does not pretend otherwise.
The New York locations are genuinely wonderful, all grimy stoops and steaming manhole covers and the city looking like it is on the verge of collapse in the best possible way. Parks has a real eye for the streets, and the film crackles with an authenticity of place that a lot of Hollywood product from the same era simply does not have. When the camera follows Roundtree through Harlem, you feel the neighbourhood rather than just observe it.
Scratch the surface, though, and there is not a great deal underneath the swagger and the soundtrack. The plot mechanics are functional at best. The climax, involving a hotel and a lot of people running around, is more frantic than thrilling. The villains are forgettable. And yet none of that quite matters, because the film is so comfortable in its own skin that you go along with it happily enough. Sometimes ninety minutes of attitude, action and one of the best themes ever written is exactly enough.
Three stars. Worth the price of admission for that opening alone, and worth revisiting whenever you need reminding what pure, uncut cool looks like on screen.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1971 | Watched: 2026-08-27
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