Shaft

Name: Shaft
Genre: Blaxploitation
Released: 1971
Duration: 100 min

Blaxploitation

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.

Something else

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Written about

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.