- Year
- 1971
- Country
- USA
- Runtime
- 100 min
- Director
- Gordon Parks
- Updated
- 10 Aug 2026
- Obscurity
- canon (12/100)
- Also known as
- Les nuits rouges de Harlem
Shaft
Gordon Parks directs a solid detective film. Isaac Hayes does the rest.
Gordon Parks, the first major Black studio director, makes a lean private-eye picture and lets Richard Roundtree walk through Harlem like he owns the pavement. The mystery is ordinary. The attitude, the coat, and Isaac Hayes's Oscar-winning score are not.
It kept MGM solvent and proved a Black-led film could cross over, which is the entire reason the next two hundred films on this shelf got made. Watch it for Roundtree and Hayes, who between them supply more cool than the plot deserves.
The theme alone earned its place in history.
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Written about
- The grindhouse and where the word came from
What a grindhouse is: a continuous-performance theatre, the 1925 trade term behind the word, and how the programming got its reputation.
- Blaxploitation, 1971 to 1975
Melvin Van Peebles caught gonorrhea on his own set, filed a workers' comp claim, and bought more film stock with the settlement. Four years later the studios had mined the audience out and moved on.
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