Shaft: Power Moves

John Shaft—a suave New York City detective who battles both the Mafia and Harlem’s own gangsters in the pursuit of justice—is the rare Black male character whose on-screen persona rotates around the traditional masculine qualities of power and control. In addition, he embodies the revolutionary “cool” of a new kind of Black masculinity, as portrayed by Richard Roundtree, a previously unknown actor who had been a member of New York City’s groundbreaking Black theater the Negro Ensemble Company. If New York is the most important city in the world, then John Shaft is definitely its king, adept at negotiating uptown and downtown and moving amid white society as easily as he does through Harlem. While Poitier had made incredible inroads into helping Hollywood to reimagine the male lead as a Black man, his characters were often viewed as asexual and offered little beyond tropes of civility and respectability. Respectability is not Shaft’s main prerogative, power is—whether it be sexual, through the threat of violence, or otherwise. Shaft has a highly charged sex scene with his Black girlfriend but also has one with a white woman, not even five years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia overturned the prohibition against miscegenation in the United States. He uses his muscles as freely as his brain and doesn’t hesitate to respond in kind to racial slurs and violence. In a scene where Shaft moves through Harlem, Isaac Hayes sings, “Black man, born free / At least that’s the way it’s supposed to be” while a chorus chants, “Soulsville.”

Behind the scenes, Parks also set out to disrupt. African Americans were included in ways that they had never been in Hollywood, from the editing to the advertising of the film. One of the most groundbreaking elements that Parks introduced, influencing all Black film going forward, was the inclusion of an innovative soundtrack by cutting-edge funk musician Isaac Hayes.

Audiences would delight not only in the location shooting, which captured a New York City—from Harlem to the Village—that is now largely lost to gentrification, but also in the frequent references to all the best of Black culture in the seventies. Drew Bundini Brown, Muhammad Ali’s flamboyant cornerman, who purportedly authored Ali’s signature catchphrase “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” is cast as Harlem gangster Willy. Antonio Fargas, who would become one of the most recognizable actors in the blaxploitation era on film and television, makes a brief appearance, as does Parks himself in a cameo role. The Bar-Kays, originally the house band for the Stax label, who virtually created southern funk and soul and later became the backing band for Otis Redding, provide the beats for the soundtrack, along with Hayes. The character of Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn) is a thinly disguised take on mobster Ellsworth Raymond “Bumpy” Johnson, who was Harlem royalty renowned, along with Stephanie “Madame” St. Clair, for keeping the Italian Mafia out of the neighborhood. Johnson died in Harlem just a few years before the movie was made and would have been very much on the minds of African American New Yorkers. The film also showcased African American vernacular, in everything from style to language, in a manner rife with a rare authenticity.