Perfect cast and a good story

best movie i've ever seen.

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Cool black private eye John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) is hired by a crime lord to find and retrieve his kidnapped daughter.This film is considered a blaxploitation classic. That seems to be an insult, even if not intended as one. It is a classic in its own right, not just as part of a subgenre. This is a great detective story, a crime story, a mob story, and to some degree a racial story (though that does not factor in as much as some might think).What better than a private eye helping out a mob boss? This introduces dark money, plenty of shady characters, and allows our hero to go places even the police might fear to tread and use methods they would never be allowed to. Classic.

John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) is a street smart private detective. Gangsters are looking for him and he throws one out the window. Bumpy (Moses Gunn) is after him. Friendly cop Vic Androzzi gives him 48 hours before bringing him back in. Bumpy's daughter has been kidnapped and he hires Shaft to find her. His first lead is Ben Buford but he doesn't seem to know anything about it and his gang is massacred. Ben and Shaft escape. Vic tells Shaft that outsider muscle have gathered in town. The white Mafia is going to war with Bumpy which could spark a race war.What a great song! As a blaxploitation, the story isn't half bad. It puts race front and center without the noble black man trope. It is violent. It's not exactly realistic. It is a stylized hard-boiled detective story in a black world. It is low budget action. There is quite a bit of filler. The pacing does have the 70s meandering quality. It makes up for it with a lot of attitude. That's what Roundtree brings. The man exudes attitude. It's also cool to see the gritty 70s NYC streets.

Picasso is quoted as having said you either do it first or you do it better.'Shaft', directed by the great Gordon Parks, does it first and leaves for succeeding generations to do it better, Later on, in 'Devil in a Blue Dress', we see Easy Rawlins as a more fully developed Bogart-like characterization. But one can easily make the case that this film broke the ground for the African American male in the private eye genre.The 'Bad ------' as a mythic heroic figure has been with us for a long time. He is found in folklore as High John De Conqueror and another figure who is sung about in blues songs named Stag-o-lee. 'High John' laughs a lot and is playful and somewhat happy-go-lucky, but when you cross him he will not hesitate to go for his guns. 'Stag-o-lee' does not clown around. He just goes for his guns and send you straight to - 'hush yo' mouth - '! All my life I heard tales about this 'Bad ------'; mostly from my folks when talking about a relative or an Uncle who was wrapped less tightly than the rest of us. He usually possessed a hair-trigger temper and was not adverse to beating down half a dozen burly whites before being torn in half and thrown into the Mississippi River. You could also slap a nickle off his fingertip and lose your life in the process. Richard Wright attempted to write about this personality type in his novel 'Native Son', but choked when it came to having his protagonist confront white males as representatives of the White Power Structure. This is what a real 'Bad ------' cuts his teeth on. A subtler version of this character is known as Ananzi the Spiderman, who shares attributes with the Greek hero Odysseus; but looming behind them all is one of the baddest 'Bad ------' types who ever lived, Shaka Zulu, but this is not the time or the place to discuss HIM. Meanwhile, truth was proving to be stranger than fiction as a myriad of 'Bad ------' types were being generated out of the Civil Rights Movement and the Revolution for Black Self Determination. Perhaps most prominent among these figures were Muhammud Ali and Malcolm X.This is not to discount the fact that Gordon Parks could be easily classed as a 'Bad ------' in his own right. This becomes quite evident in one of his autobiographies, 'A Choice of Weapons'. But it is important to understand how 'Shaft', along with Melvin Van Peebles 'Sweet Sweetback's Badass Song' and 'Superfly' came out of the highly charged cultural upheavals of the sixties and seventies. The impact of 'Shaft' depends to a certain extent on understanding it in context with its times and is definitely enriched should you have lived through the period as I have done.This period of cultural foment is so highly charged nobody seems to notice that one of the characters; Bumpy Jonas' daughter, actually has not one line of dialog in 'Shaft'! She is the object of the search and rescue mission conducted by private eye John Shaft and yet besides some moaning and sobbing, we find out absolutely nothing about her.The truth is Gordon Parks' 'Shaft' lacks an exposition or at best an inciting incident where we see the actual kidnapping of Marcy; Bumpy Jonas' daughter. Since we're making comparisons between John Shaft and Sam Spade, it would not have hurt him to have an attractive Gal Friday holding down the fort at the office. The lovemaking scene between Shaft and his main squeeze probably would have also gone better near the beginning of the movie. It would not have hurt also to show Bumpy's gang attempting to rescue Marcy unsuccessfully before hiring Shaft and then bringing in Isaac Hayes' theme music. It is also a mystery why the hit men after Shaft don't have a photograph of him or physical description of some kind to go by as they seek him out. I also think the first confrontation between Shaft, Bumpy's daughter and the mob should have probably been all dialog. What redeemed this film for me was the convoluted and well thought out Endgame that Shaft and his cohorts execute upon the kidnappers. When Shaft successfully pulls this off and gives the Police Lieutenant Vic Androzzi his High John De Conqueror laugh, I still feel a palpable thrill. After that, he strides off too cool for school as Isaac Hayes' Oscar winning Theme Music takes us into the credits.

I heard a bit about this movie, and from what I know it is supposed to be a cult movie, so when I saw it in the video store I decided to hire it out to see what it was all about. Basically Shaft is described as being one of the Black Exploitation movies. Basically it is a movie where all of the main characters are Negros and white people are only cast when either necessary or to fill the role of the bad guys. In the case of this movie there are really no clear cut good or bad guys.Shaft is about the Negro detective John Shaft (Richard Roundtree). Shaft is basically a very tough guy that intimidates but isn't intimidated. He is also what is described in the opening song (which won composer Isaac Hayes an Oscar) as a sex machine. He only sleeps with two girls in the movie though, and one of them is his woman, but they do both comment on his prowess.What is interesting is that all of the characters are basically thugs. None of them have any really redeeming traits and are simply trying to bully each other into submission. This isn't just focused on the Negroes in the movie, but everybody acts as bullies, from the Anglo police officers to the Italian Mafia. It is just that Shaft's bullying is more effective than others.Just because Shaft is a bully, it does not mean he is stupid. He does not go bursting into a room full of armed men unless he is sure that he can win. He doesn't run away either, but rather he remains calm and collected, and then turns the tables on his opponents.I guess Shaft takes the human race as it comes. They are little more than thugs trying to best each other, either through brute force, charisma, or intellect. In the end, it always comes down to might means right, and that is not always the physical side, for elections are little more than popularity competitions, and the most charismatic will generally win.