Just what I expected

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

One neat little bonus of going on a Neo Noir hunt is finding those diamonds in the rough that come completely out of left field. Sometimes a film is hyped so fully as one thing that its never looked upon or considered as any thing else. This film especially so since its considered one of the first of its own genre.Shaft (1971) has been called the first blaxploitation flick, screw that and it's derogatory connotations (think Sergio Leone vs the majority of "Spaghetti" Westerns as a reference point), its actually not only a great PI film, directed by Gordon Parks (acclaimed photojournalist for Life magazine ) but also shot in a very noir-ish style by Urs Furrer. Between the eye of the director and the skill of the cinematographer the film looks beautiful. The shots of Manhattan, The Village, Harlem circa 1970 are gorgeous. It's sleazy Times Square/42nd Street at fin d'une époque, before Disneyfication eradicated it all.Establishing shot, an aerial view of 7th Avenue Manhattan looking North towards Broadway and Times Square. A cacophony of traffic blares skyward, we look down upon madly scintillating 42nd Street theater marquees, classic Hollywood product, Lancasters The Scaphuters, Redfords's Little Faus And Big Halsey competing with triple X features He And She, School for Sex and The Wild Females, this ain't Busby Berkeley Territory anymore. Isaac Hayes' soul and funk-styled iconic theme song begins to pulsate the title appears over a subway entrance as leather clad Shaft glides up to the trash littered gum stained sidewalk and jaywalks his way across the main stem. This title sequence segues into the beginning of the story when Shaft is alerted by Marty the blind news stand paper seller that two cats were looking for him. Shaft is based on an Ernest Tidyman and John D. F. Black screenplay from a book by Tidyman. The dialogs are all spot on in 70's hip jive. It's co-produced by Stirling Silliphant (who wrote late classic noirs, 5 Against the House, Nightfall, The Lineup and also neo noir -ish In The Heat Of The Night). What's sad is Shaft gets right what practically every Mike Hammer, the quintessential NY P.I, based film neglects, and that is a real feel for the gritty noir, on location, underbelly side of New York City. (save Allen Baron's 1961 Blast Of Silence, and Armand Assante's I, The Jury(1982)) and even the latter doesn't spend near enough time in the streets Shaft is a very plausible re-imagining of the classic private eye flick. The P.I. was always about cool this go round it is about back COOL. Richard Roundtree is perfect as the suave hip protagonist John Shaft, a good detective, grudgingly getting genuine respect from all. Moses Gunn is incredibly good as tough crime boss Bumpy Jonas showing quite a bit of range as he pleads with Shaft to take his case. Charles Cioffi as Androzzi Shaft's NYPD detective cop buddy holds his own and runs interference between Shaft and the department. Drew Bundini Brown is Bumpy henchman Willy, Christopher St. John is Ben Buford a former hood rat friend of Shaft who is now a black militant, Antonio Fargas is great as streetwise Bunky. Character actor Lee Steele plays a blind news vender. Shaft is a Neo Noir New York City wet dream, it hits on all cylinders, check it out. 10/10

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.

Probably had Shaft not won an Oscar for its theme as the Best Original Song it would be barely remembered as one of the first of the black exploitation films that seem to explode out of Hollywood. The late Sixties after the Civil Rights Revolution, Hollywood discovered that black people were a neglected audience, that A. was not happy with how it was previously portrayed and B. would pay to see more than just films that starred Sidney Poitier.It's an average action/adventure film when you come right down to it, but that is not to say that star Richard Roundtree didn't create an interesting character. John Shaft is a private detective who even police lieutenant Charles Cioffi knows to give a free hand to as he's into sources of information the cops don't have access to.Something that Harlem drug kingpin Moses Gunn is also aware of when he hires Shaft to locate his kidnapped daughter. Gunn isn't exactly telling Shaft the whole truth about the circumstances. But Shaft catches on quickly enough that this is all part of a three party struggle for the control of Harlem between Italian gangsters, black militants and Gunn's own crew.There's a nice explosive climax in the end as the daughter's fate is in Shaft's hands. Enough action to satisfy any junkie.And of course there's Isaac Hayes's score with the theme and it's a type of song that never got the Academy recognition before. I don't one like that has since. But in terms of the film itself, the score perfectly captures the mood.Can you dig it.

The NAACP gave up trying to persuade Hollywood to cast more African-Americans in films and television shows in 1963 and resorted to legal measures and economic sanctions. Consequently, blacks began to appear in both major and minor roles in greater numbers. Actor Sidney Poitier emerged in the late 1960s as the first truly popular African-American actor and qualified as an example of "the model integrationist hero." By the 1970s, African-Americans had turned up not only in ghetto-themed movies but also every other film genre and television show. Meanwhile, the discrimination that black actresses encountered simply mirrored the shortage of roles white actresses had contended with in Hollywood since time immemorial. Former Cleveland Browns football star Jim Brown rose to prominence in the wake of Sidney Poitier as the new African-American hero. Poitier and Brown served as precursors for Blaxploitation.Eventually, the pendulum swung from one extreme with the racist depiction of blacks as subservient Sambo characters before the 1960s to the newest extreme with blacks portrayed as Superspades in what later constituted a cinematic phenomenon called Blaxploitation. Essentially, the golden age of Blaxploitation movies occurred between 1970 and 1975 and these movie targeted primarily black audiences. Blaxploitation heroes and heroines displayed a social and political consciousness, and they were not confined to single roles. They were cast as private eyes, policemen, vigilantes, troubleshooters, pimps, etc. In each instance, these characters worked within the system, but they did so as they saw fit and sought to improve the African-American community. Not surprisingly, blaxploitation heroes often clashed with whites, but they refused to depict whites in strictly monolithic terms. Good whites and bad whites jockeyed for prominence in the films. Although one NAACP official described blaxploitation as just "another form of cultural genocide," African-American audiences flocked to see them. Blaxploitation movies knew no boundaries and encompassed comedies, musicals, westerns, coming-of-age dramas, slave plantation films, and horror movies.Director Ossie Davis' urban crime thriller "Cotton Comes to Harlem" (1970), about two African-American N.Y.P.D. cops, Coffin Ed Johnson (Raymond St. Jacques) and Gravedigger Jones (Godfrey Cambridge), based on the Chester Himes novel, paved the way for the movement. When the film premiered, critics did not categorize Cotton as blaxploitation. Interestingly, the term "black exploitation" first appeared in print in the August 16, 1972, issue of the show business newspaper "Variety" when the NAACP Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch president, Junius Griffin, coined the term in a speech about the derogatory impact of the genre on African-Americans. Later, black exploitation was abbreviated as blaxploitation. The two films that historians have classified as "germinal" were independent filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles' "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" (1971) and mainstream director Gordon Parks' "Shaft" (1971). Peebles's film supplemented the content of Davis' film with sex and violence, and Sweetback's success with black audiences triggered the blaxploitation craze, one of the most profitable in cinematic history. Major Hollywood film studios rushed similar films into production. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer followed Sweetback's success with their private eye thriller "Shaft" (1971) starring model-turned-actor Richard Roundtree as the equivalent of Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade gumshoe character in "The Maltese Falcon." Some critics complained that movies like Shaft simply substituted blacks in roles that were traditionally played by whites. Initially, MGM thought about of rewriting the African-American lead in Shaft, based on Ernst Tidyman's novel as a Caucasian.As a detective movie, Shaft observed all the conventions of the genre. The action opens with the trench-coated protagonist wearing out shoe leather in Manhattan to the tune of Isaac Hayes' Oscar-winning theme music. The lyrics provided a thumbnail sketch of the hero's persona. Private detective John Shaft lives up to those lyrics as "the cat who won't cop out when there's danger all about." An infamous Harlem crime lord, Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn), loosely based on real-life criminal Bumpy Johnson, hires Shaft to locate his missing daughter Marcy. Eventually, Shaft discovers that the Italian mafia has abducted her and he assembles a motley crew of black militants to help him rescue Marcy. The success of Shaft spawned two sequels "Shaft's Big Score" (1972) and "Shaft in Africa" (1973) and later a short-lived television series. Many blaxploitation movies gained notoriety for negative portrayals of African-Americans trapped in the ghettos that resorted to crime and vice to triumph over their hostile surroundings and oppressive white landlords.