Frame By Frame – Shaft (1971)

Year – 1971
Decade – 1970s
Cinematographer – Urs Furrer
Director – Gordon Parks
Genre – Action
Tags – Blaxploitation; Detective
Shooting Location – New York City
Studio – MGM
Aspect Ratio – 1.85
Format – 35mm film with spherical lenses

The Movie

“People come up and ask me if we really need this image of Shaft the black superman. Hell yes, there’s a place for John Shaft. I was overwhelmed by our world premiere on Broadway. Suddenly, I was the perpetrator of a hero. Ghetto kids were coming downtown to see their hero, Shaft, and here was a black man on the screen they didn’t have to be ashamed of. Here they had a chance to spend their $3 on something they wanted to see. We need movies about the history of our people, yes, but we need heroic fantasies about our people, too. We all need a little James Bond now and then.” – Shaft director Gordon Parks in a 1972 interview with Roger Ebert

Though the character of John Shaft is closer to the cynically cool private eyes of the noir era than a Bond-esque superspy, Parks’ quote succinctly defines the cultural impact of his 1971 film. Shaft began an extended cycle of movies where black faces were in the heroic leads of escapist genre efforts for the first time for a wide audience. However, one difference between Shaft and many of the films that followed in the “blaxploitation” cycle is there were also black faces behind the camera. Parks, a celebrated still photographer for Life magazine for decades, made his directorial debut in 1969 at the age of 55 with an adaptation of his own novel, The Learning Tree – becoming the first black director to helm a major studio film. His career in the movies was relatively short-lived. He made only three more features after Shaft – the 1972 sequel Shaft’s Big Score! followed by The Super Cops (1974) and the biopic Leadbelly (1976).

The plot of Shaft follows the titular private detective (Richard Roundtree) as he’s hired by a Harlem mobster (Moses Gunn) to retrieve his kidnapped daughter from Italian gangsters. But the generic plot is hardly the point. To me, the joy of Shaft is watching Roundtree strut through the Harlem, Greenwich Village and Times Square of the early 1970s, captured with Parks’ exquisite eye for street photography.