This reminded me of something we missed...Cotton Comes to Harlem. It'll have to wait until the next time I go on a Tarantino rant. Enjoy!
From the New York State Writer's Institute:
SHAFT was a financial bombshell that exploded in the face of the struggling Hollywood film industry. In the wake of lumbering, multi-million dollar flops like TORA TORA TORA! and the traumatic takeover of the old studios by the conglomerates and holding companies, SHAFT introduced the faltering American film industry to its previously-ignored Black audience. The film was made for $1,543,000. It grossed $7,080,000 in domestic rentals. The film’s irresistible theme music was the foundation of a record that virtually invented the modern soundtrack album six years before SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER; SHAFT’s album had sold well over a million units by the time the "Theme from Shaft" won its Academy Award. SHAFT was even optioned by CBS as an idea for a television series, which had a brief run in 1972. In every respect, SHAFT proved that Black Power included economic power as well.
Coming in the wake of Melvin van Peebles’ SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG, which had been released only a few months earlier, and Ossie Davis’ COTTON COMES TO HARLEM of 1970, SHAFT verified what the Black Power movement had implied: that there was a Black audience for popular culture images. SHAFT’s big-studio release (the 12th highest grossing film of the year was a bright spot for troubled MGM) showed the way for other studios, and by 1972, spurred by the success of SUPERFLY, directed by the late Gordon Parks Jr., the Blaxploitation cycle was fully launched. SHAFT was harshly criticized, even mocked, by mainstream critics, and by outraged Black critics who felt that the film put on extravagant display precisely the same qualities of sexual license and irrational anger racists had been assigning Blacks for years. Films such as COFFY, CLEOPATRA JONES, TRUCK TURNER, PETEY WHEATSTRAW, DOLOMITE, SHEBA, BABY and dozens of others followed, but SHAFT was the originator of the first entirely new cinematic genre in a generation.
What prim critics missed in their outrage was that SHAFT owes a great deal to existing genres, and that John Shaft was not only "the first authentic Black superhero" but an emphatically American screen type of long standing, the private eye who refuses to work within the stupid, corrupt institutions of the law enforcement establishment. SHAFT was written by Ernest Tidyman, fresh from his triumph as author of THE FRENCH CONNECTION, to which, with its breathless chase scenes and gritty urban setting, SHAFT is a dark cousin. And, like Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, John Shaft is a sardonic, ascetic loner, for whom the pursuit of justice is a knightly quest. Gordon Parks’s offhand comment "It’s just a Saturday night fun picture which people go to see because they want to see the Black guy winning," was disingenuous; in fact, SHAFT revealed a Black action hero who was both strong and good, both sexy and honest, and intelligent enough to outwit evil in whatever skin it wore. Gordon Parks has always been fascinated by Black characters whose mere presence insists to the local white power structure on the right of Black self-determination and the fact of Black moral strength and physical courage. Parks’s protagonists cannot be denied, and as whites seek vainly to "understand" (read, "control") these characters, they discover how shaky the psychological foundations of racist superiority really are. John Shaft not only solves a crime; he leaves even his sympathetic white male contacts in law enforcement wondering about their own future atop the social heap. "You’re a wise Caucasian, Vic," Shaft tells "Lieutenant Androzzi" (Charles Cioffi), and it is unlikely that Androzzi will ever think of himself in quite the same way, because of what Shaft has taught about what true mastery of one’s environment looks like.
John Shaft walks the mean streets of Harlem, but, like many other Parks characters, he also lives and works with whites. He has casual sex with a white woman, and is visibly annoyed with the stupidity of some of his white colleagues, preferring to work alone rather be slowed up by their dull-wittedness. John Shaft is at once an utterly American screen hero in the tradition of John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart, a man of integrity, action and passion rather than words and ideas, and he is also utterly disrespectful of 300 years of second-class citizenship. For the vast numbers of white audience members who were mesmerized by this disturbing, expressive image of Black manhood on the screen, Shaft’s "badness" was a goodness they had to recognize and acknowledge.
Technical Information:
Title: Shaft
Year: 1971
Country: USA
Director: Gordon Parks
Source: Retail DVD5
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 4.18 GB
Length: 1:40:10
Programs used: ImgBurn
Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG2 @ ~5800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps
Audio 1: English- Dolby AC3 Mono @ 192 kb/s
Audio 2: Français- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English, Français
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras:
- Soul in Cinema: Filming Shaft on location
- Cast and Crew
- Trailers
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Shaft Megaupload Links