...THIS CAT SHAFT IS A BAD MOTHER....

For the record, there are two songs that I want played at my funeral (whenever that day comes and hopefully not for many, many years). The first is EL PASO by Marty Robbins. The second is Isaac Hayes' THEME FROM SHAFT. 

I'm not kidding.

For some reason, I never saw SHAFT when it was first released in1971. I've since seen it twice now and I love every minute of it. It's not a great film, in fact, far from it, but it's a landmark in the American cinema of the '70s, qualifying as the first of the "blaxploitation" film trend that dominated urban and inner city movie screens for much of the decade. I'm a huge blaxploitation fan and SHAFT is the grandaddy of them all.

Richard Roundtree stars as New York City private detective John Shaft. He's all leather jackets, turtle-neck shirts and .38 police specials. As the title song indicates, Shaft is indeed a ladies man, bedding both an African American woman and a white woman he picks up in a bar. He maintains a rat hole of an office for his private detective business, which must be profitable, since he has a cool apartment (complete with a  reel-to-reel tape machine and a spiral staircase). Shaft has a love/hate relationship with the NYPD and he's constantly being squeezed by Lt. Vic Androzzi (Charles Cioffi) for information about what's going on with the criminal gangs in Harlem.

What's going on is that the daughter of Harlem crime lord Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn), has been kidnapped and held for ransom by the Mafia. Shaft is the only man Bumpy can trust to get her back which Shaft does with the help of a group of radical young men led by Ben Buford (Christopher St. John). 

Roundtree owns the film from start to finish. He struts and swaggers around Manhattan with cool to spare, gleaning information from a variety of sources. When the action comes, he's tough enough to take a couple of slugs and keep going. That's right, this cat Shaft is a bad mother....

Hayes' Oscar winning title track is one for the ages, as is the rest of his score, which served as the template for countless other '70s detective films and television shows. Director Gordon Parks and cinematographer Urs Furrer have a real feel for the New York City locations and the whole production has that unmistakably '70s gritty look and flavor. 

Roundtree returned as Shaft in two sequels, SHAFT'S BIG SCORE ! (1972) and SHAFT IN AFRICA (1973) and played the detective in the short lived SHAFT television series on CBS-TV in 1973-1974.

 As an urban crime film, SHAFT is pretty routine. But as the opening salvo of the blaxploitation film trend, the introduction of a legendary screen hero and as a time capsule of NYC in the '70s, SHAFT can't be beat. 

Thumbs up.