Shaft: The Private Eye Who Changed Hollywood

The most subversive thing about Shaft is how conventional it is. Strip the 1971 release date and the Isaac Hayes theme and you have a private-eye picture that Raymond Chandler would have recognised down to the furniture: a lone operative with an office and a bad attitude, a missing daughter, a client who is himself a criminal, two rival organisations squeezing him from either side, and a city that will not help. Gordon Parks changed exactly one variable. He made the detective Black, put him in Harlem and Greenwich Village instead of Los Angeles, and let him be entirely, unapologetically in command of both. That single substitution was enough to reroute an industry.

I first saw it on television in the late nineties, long after the theme had become a punchline through sheer overexposure, and the surprise was how unhurried and adult the film is. It has none of the frantic quality the word “blaxploitation” tends to summon. It walks.

The formula, moved

Ernest Tidyman wrote the novel and co-wrote the screenplay with John D F Black. Tidyman was a white newspaperman from Ohio who, in the same period, wrote the screenplay for The French Connection and took the Academy Award for it — a fact people enjoy pointing at, and one that is less scandalous than it sounds once you understand what the film actually did with his material. Parks and Richard Roundtree supplied everything the page could not.

John Shaft is hired by Bumpy Jonas, a Harlem crime boss played with wonderful weary heaviness by Moses Gunn, to find his kidnapped daughter. The trail runs towards the Mafia downtown and towards a Black militant group led by Ben Buford, played by Christopher St John, who has history with Shaft. The detective ends up as the only man who can move between all three worlds, which is the film’s real proposition: Harlem, the mob and the movement each need him, and none of them own him.

That structure is the classical hardboiled shape — the eye as the only free agent in a city of interlocking rackets — and Parks knows it. What he adds is a specificity that the formula had never carried. Shaft walks across a real Manhattan intersection in a real leather coat in real traffic, and the camera stays wide enough that you can see the city refusing to part for him. He has an apartment with books in it. He talks to his white police contact, Lieutenant Androzzi, played by Charles Cioffi, with a mutual contempt that reads as the most honest professional relationship in the film.

Roundtree

Richard Roundtree had done almost no film work before this. He had modelled, he had come through the Negro Ensemble Company, and Parks cast him on presence. The performance is a masterclass in a specific and underrated register: unbothered. Roundtree plays Shaft as a man who has already calculated the odds in every room he enters and has decided he will be fine. He is never surprised. He is rarely loud. When he is threatened he looks mildly inconvenienced.

That choice is why the film reads as power rather than posture. The cycle would spend the next four years producing heroes who announced themselves; Roundtree just stands there and lets the room adjust. The closest comparison is Bogart in The Big Sleep, and the resemblance is deliberate down to the tailoring.

Roundtree died in 2023, and the obituaries all reached for the same word — cool — which is accurate and slightly insufficient. What he actually did was make competence sexy on screen for a Black lead at a major studio, at a moment when the studios had never tried it.

Isaac Hayes and the sound of a man walking

Hayes was on Stax, at the peak of his powers, and had reportedly hoped to play Shaft himself before the job narrowed to the score. What he delivered has been so thoroughly absorbed into the culture that it takes effort to hear it fresh. The famous element is the sixteenth-note hi-hat and the wah-wah guitar figure, played by Charles “Skip” Pitts, and the reason it works is structural: the wah-wah pulses in the rhythm of footsteps. It is walking music. Parks cuts the opening titles to Shaft crossing midtown, and the score and the edit and the man’s gait are locked together, so the first thing the film teaches you is what this character’s tempo is.

“Theme from Shaft” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, making Hayes the first Black composer to take that prize. The score’s success is a large part of why every studio in town spent 1972 hiring a soul musician before hiring a director — a chain of causation that runs directly to Curtis Mayfield’s work on Super Fly and eventually to Hayes scoring and starring in Truck Turner.

Parks, and why the craft holds up

Gordon Parks arrived at Shaft as one of the most accomplished photographers in America, a Life staffer who had spent decades composing images of Black life for a white readership, and who had already directed The Learning Tree (1969) — the first film by a Black director financed and released by a major Hollywood studio at that scale. He was in his late fifties. He was not a young man chasing a trend.

You can see the photographer in every location choice. Parks shoots Harlem and midtown with an evenness that refuses to code either as exotic. There are no wild angles, no sensational lighting on the Black interiors and flattering lighting on the white ones. The camera treats a Harlem bar and a Mafia office as two rooms in the same city, and that neutrality is a political argument delivered entirely through exposure and lens choice.

The other thing Parks does, and this is the craft note I would press on anyone watching it for the first time, is give scenes room to be boring. Shaft has coffee. Shaft makes calls. Shaft waits. The film’s action is compressed into short, ugly, quickly-over bursts, and everything around them is procedure. MGM was in serious financial trouble when it made this, and the received wisdom that Shaft’s box office helped keep the lights on is a good story with real substance to it. The studio got a hit, and the hit was a patient film.

What the franchise proved

The sequels are the underrated evidence. MGM went straight back for Shaft’s Big Score! (1972), with Parks directing again and Roundtree returning, and then Shaft in Africa (1973), which relocated the character to the continent under John Guillermin and stretched the premise past its elastic limit. A CBS television series followed in 1973, running seven feature-length episodes with Roundtree still in the coat and the violence sanded down to network tolerance.

None of them are as good as the first. All of them matter, because a franchise is a form of institutional permission. Sequels get made when a studio’s accounting department believes in a character, and until 1971 no accounting department in Hollywood had ever been asked to believe in a Black one. The property kept working for decades: John Singleton’s Shaft in 2000 with Samuel L Jackson, and another in 2019, both of which had Roundtree back to bless the succession. Sixty years of American cinema had produced no Black franchise lead. Then there was one, and the argument about whether it was possible ended permanently.

The novel side is worth a footnote too. Ernest Tidyman kept writing Shaft books through the seventies, seven of them, and they are stranger and pulpier than the films — closer to the mens’-adventure paperback racks than to Chandler. The screen version is the polished one, which almost never happens.

The case against

Two objections, both fair. The first is that Shaft is politically evasive by design. Ben Buford’s militants are used as plot furniture, hired muscle for a private client, and the film declines to engage with what they believe. Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door arrived two years later to make exactly that argument, and next to it Shaft looks like what it is: a studio product that took the iconography of Black power and left the politics on the pavement.

The second is that the film is, frankly, thin. The mystery is slight, the villains are generic, and the emotional stakes belong to a man we meet twice. Shaft survives on Roundtree, Parks’s eye and Hayes’s twelve bars. Remove any of the three and there is not much film underneath.

I would answer that the thinness was the point and the achievement. A Black hero being permitted an ordinary, mid-budget, professionally-made genre picture — with sequels, a television series and a franchise — was the breakthrough. Ordinariness was the barrier all along.

Spoilers below

Shaft finds the girl. The kidnapping turns out to be the Mafia leaning on Bumpy Jonas over Harlem territory, and the resolution is a raid on a hotel where she is being held — Shaft, Buford’s men and a fire hose, executed as a small tactical operation rather than a spectacle. He gets her out. He phones Androzzi and tells him to solve the rest himself, and hangs up.

That final gesture is the whole film. Shaft does the job, refuses the police the credit and the cooperation, and exits. He owes nobody. Parks lets the credits roll on a man walking away from every institution in the story with his fee and his autonomy intact, and in 1971 no Black character at a major American studio had been allowed that ending.

The verdict: a modest, superbly made private-eye picture whose modesty is the historical event. It plays better than its reputation, largely because its reputation is now the theme song, and the theme song has flattened the memory of a careful, adult, patiently observed crime film. Go for Roundtree’s stillness and Parks’s photography; the wah-wah is a bonus.

What to watch next: Shaft’s Big Score! (1972) if you want Parks and Roundtree again with more budget and less discipline; Cotton Comes to Harlem for the Harlem detective picture that arrived a year earlier and got there first; and the blaxploitation canon for the ten that hold. The film is on disc and streams; the score is essential regardless.