I'm seeing the name of this series in the subject of a post for the first time, and I don't love it. But, I feel like I've committed to it, and hey, it's only 12 months, ha ha.
Actually, the series title is appropriate because this is a blog that likes portmanteaus. You know that. "Blaxploitation" is already a portmanteau of "black" and "exploitation," and this just adds a third segment to the portmanteau. If two is good, three is even better.
When I chose Shaft for the debut of Blaxploitaudient, though, I didn't know it was also going to be a Richard Roundtree Memorial Viewing.
When I'm watching movies, I'm not on my phone, but I do sometimes like to look up the ages of the actors. It's a little game. I guess how old they are and I see how close I am to being right. The number of times I am dead on is pretty remarkable.
When Shaft started, I guessed that Richard Roundtree was 84. It turns out, I was off by three years -- but also, he died three months ago at age 81.
It was news I missed at the time. I'm not sure I would have done anything on the blog to note his passing. Shaft is easily his most prominent work, and I hadn't seen it until Monday night. I wasn't likely going to write an in memoriam piece for his bunch of small supporting roles in features ranging from Brick to Se7en to Boat Trip. But I did always enjoy his presence, so I would have felt sorrow on October 24th, hearing he had passed from pancreatic cancer. Instead, I feel sorrow now.
The viewing of Shaft allowed me to appreciate where it all began for Roundtree, on the day I learned it had all ended for him.
Gordon Parks knew what he was doing when he cast Roundtree as John Shaft. The charisma radiates off the screen, and that's only partly because Isaac Hayes' iconic theme song has done some of the work to make the man larger than life.
That opening, with the theme song, was indeed my favorite part of the movie, just because that song is so great. But this is a pretty sturdy film overall, perhaps not quite what I was expecting in terms of size and scope -- but that's because Shaft wasn't conceived as some game changer, at least I don't think it was. Obviously a huge hit, it has come to achieve significant prominence in our culture over the years, such that it has already been remade twice (both times starring Samuel L. Jackson). However, at its core, this is a low-budget film from the early 1970s, and sometimes it shows.
For example, there's at least one exterior scene where the sound is really bad. I guess they decided to mic it up live rather than doing dubbing in post, and while I do appreciate the greater seamlessness of that choice, the dialogue in that scene sounds tinny and far away.
But is this a substantive criticism of Shaft? No it is not. And I make it only because it helped remind me just what sort of underdogs these films were.
This is a pretty tight narrative by the loose standards of movies about private eyes. With only very few small tangents, the film deals with Shaft's case to find the kidnapped daughter of a mover and shaker in the Harlem criminal scene, with the great name of Bumpy. (That's Moses Gunn.) The police are also hip to things related to the case, though because of Bumpy's status in the criminal underworld, he can't formally go through them. That's why he has Shaft.
It occurred to me that this was an interesting watch in the wake of my viewing of Charlie's Country last week, which I wrote about in my last post. Shaft has a similar relationship to the police that Charlie has in that movie, someone they lean on when it's convenient for them and abuse when they think they can get away with it. Charlie gets the last laugh sometimes in that movie, but Shaft gets the last laugh a lot more here -- as that is literally how the movie ends, on his laughter after hanging up a pay phone on the detective who is his most frequent contact on that side of the law.
And so it is worth transitioning into a discussion of race. What I found clever about Shaft is that race is everpresent without being a constant topic of conversation. With a world more than 50 years less progressive than it is today, clearly Shaft has a significant lack of privilege relative to the white characters. But they aren't all dropping n-words on him left and right, and even the relatively few uses of that word are more about him ("I'm looking for an n-word named John Shaft") then at him ("Hey n-word!"). He understands how to live in this world without making more than a few snide comments here and there, and gives back as good as he gets. He doesn't feel disempowered by this world, which is probably one of the reasons he was such an aspirational figure to the Black culture at large in 1971.
There's some good staging here, too. A couple of shootouts are more than decent, and the film ends on a particularly high note in that regard, as Shaft and the "army" he recruits (for $10,000 a head of Bumpy's money) put together a plan whose details aren't evident until Parks springs them on us in a great minute-long sequence in which it all comes to fruition. A thrilling way to end a very solid movie.
One thing I did notice, though, was that there was a small part of me that figured Shaft was monogamous. "He's a complicated man, and no one understands him but his woman." Indeed we are introduced to "his woman" early on, and though it seems like they are a mutually dedicated pair who challenge each other, Shaft is not faithful to her. Later on in the movie he sleeps with a white woman, one of those few tangents that has no bearing on the narrative that I can see. However, I suppose this just makes him a bit more like James Bond -- who was getting his final (authorized) turn from Sean Connery that same year in Diamonds Are Forever.
Haven't chosen the movie for next month ... though with it being Black History Month, perhaps I need to hold myself to a standard of picking just the right thing, with a little extra empowerment thrown in for good measure.
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