Everything hits differently when viewed on a big screen versus a small one. Even then, the opening to Shaft hits really differently - more so if, instead of a restored digital presentation, the film is projected from a raw, scratched-up 35mm print, as it was this Thursday at the venerable Philadelphia Film Center for a one-night engagement.
Shaft begins with director Gordon Parks and cinematographer Urs Furrer's bird's-eye camera view of Times Square. With only the ambience of Midtown traffic underneath, we tilt down and zoom in, cutting away from our sightline up 7th and Broadway to a new vantage of the "Forty Deuce," 42nd Street's now long defunct row of walk-in grindhouses playing double features ranging from star-studded Westerns to bargain-bin sexploitation flicks. As Isaac Hayes's iconic theme kicks in and the title comes up in bold red letters, the titular private detective John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) emerges from the subway, crosses 7th, and makes his way uptown.
One can only imagine what it must have been like to behold this sequence in late-June, 1971 when the film was first released. But one thing's for sure: Neither the digital projection process nor the diminutive stature of the television or laptop can adequately convey its aesthetic and spiritual significance to new audiences. When folks see Shaft now, especially if they have never seen it before, its removal from the darkness and celluloid grit of a red-velvet theater experience embellishes its defects and undersells its virtues. Having joined other early-'70s hits such as Ossie Davis's Cotton Comes to Harlem and Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback Baadasssss Song in inaugurating an unprecedented cycle of visibility and autonomy for not only black actors, but also for black writers and directors in American cinema, Shaft is now in jeopardy of not being accorded its due distinction from the "Blaxploitation" films it inspired, its apparent cheapness and relative lack of technical competency heightened by the narrow prism through which it is viewed, diluting its artistic and historical significance. Only revival on the silver screen can do justice to a work that, in spite of its narrow ambition, its dramatic over-simplicity, and its messy execution overall, reveals a persistent emotional depth, potency, and resonance. Just as Hayes croons that our hero is "a complicated man" - which is, admittedly, a thematic notion that can strain the incredulity of a casual viewer, even in the best of faith - so, too, is Shaft a complicated movie. But you really need to see it big and bright in order to internalize how complex, and how much plain damned fun, it really is.
One should make sure to pay attention to the subtleties of Roundtree's physical performance, even within just a few seconds of his appearing on screen. Only 28-years-old at the time of filming and with limited dramatic experience behind him, Roundtree's acting is certainly green, a tad awkward and forced at times, but it's easy to see what Parks saw in simply the presence of this former Ebony Fashion Show model, leading him to pluck Roundtree from obscurity and cast him as the world's first certified black action hero. As soon as he walks out under the awnings of the Deuce marquees, Shaft's back is up; he's alert and casting his steely glance in all directions, like he expects to be followed. Dallying on his way to his Times Square offices, he's sure to stop by a local news stand and shoeshine, where he learns that two guys from Harlem have come downtown looking for him. Shaft gets the drop on the two gentlemen, and a scuffle ensues in which one of them falls out a third story window. Putting a gun to the other's head, Shaft learns that the two men have been sent by "Bumpy" Jonas (Moses Gunn), the biggest racketeer in Harlem. Shaft insists that Bumpy come see him personally, and when he deigns to comply, Shaft learns that Bumpy's daughter has gone missing, and that he wants to hire Shaft to find her.
Despising Bumpy personally, but shaken by the sight of his seemingly earnest grief, Shaft agrees to take the job, for a heavy price. Bumpy has no leads, but suspects that Ben Bufford (Christopher St. John), a former friend of Shaft's and now the leader of a small band of militant black nationalists, might know something. Tagging all along the way is Vic Androzzi, a white police lieutenant who threatens to tie Shaft up in litigation over the death of Bumpy's henchman if he doesn't turn pigeon for the cops. Vic's office has been getting "rumblings" of something big about to go off in Harlem, and it's only when Shaft finally makes contact with Ben, and Ben's militant hideout is suddenly raided by a pack of Mafia hitmen, that he realizes that there's more at stake here than just a missing person's case. Shaft now finds himself deep in the pocket of one of the city's most ruthless gangsters on the eve of a potential war between his Harlem syndicate and the Italian Mafia, a conflict that, Vic fears, has the potential to boil over into a full-blown race riot.
Whether in his offices overlooking Times Square or in his swanky Greenwich Village apartment, Shaft straddles a thin line in a geographically and socially segregated world rocked by rising poverty, political instability, and racial animus. Clearly inspired by his white antecedents - the Sam Spades, Philip Marlowes, and Lew Archers of detective novel and film noir canon - he appears to us as a fully embodied Western male hero, carving out a life in the fraught margins between the law-and-order status quo and the lawless underbelly of vice and sin. But as a black man, he experiences that divide in a manner where its racial subtext is simply text.
Shaft's tastes are expensive, his sexual proclivities free-wheeling, and his lifestyle is unstructured and hedonic. Either his determined journey out of the chasm of poverty has turned him into the chauvinistic brute he is today, or he was simply born with that kind of preternatural, mythopoeic masculinity pumping through his veins. But Shaft is, for all of his uncompromising force, also good-humored and charming. Despite the line he treads, he is beset by no neuroses or lack of confidence in his own persona. That proves a captivating combination, as it means Shaft can move all but effortlessly through the worlds of black and white. He can flatly insult or outright bedevil Vic, and though Vic's sergeant will make his racist contempt of Shaft clear ("That boy's got a lotta mouth on him"), and the district attorney's office may want to nail him to the wall for his methods, Vic still has his back. And he has his back not just because, in classic cop movie fashion, Shaft "gets results." (By the film's finale, even whether or not he gets results, as opposed to leaving a big mess for the vested authorities to clean up, is debatable.) He has his back because he clearly, visibly admires Shaft, to a degree of even vicariously living through Shaft, wanting to be him.
As far as Harlem is concerned, Shaft may get called an Uncle Tom by Ben Bufford, but when he comes through the neighborhood, despite the occasional blank stares, shut mouths, or greased palms he meets along the way, he commands a similar degree of respect and admiration. Just as the film would prove considerably successful among urban black audiences, particularly young males, so too does the strong, smooth, imperviously confident character imply his own folk mythology within the world of the film itself, a model of the black man succeeding against all odds in a threatening white world.
And, of course, Shaft has another thing going for him with respect to the particular social and cultural values of an oppressed black world as opposed to the oppressive white one: He doesn't snitch, even when his own job is on the line. "All the static and hassle in the world wouldn't make me sing a song for the police," he tells Vic. And he doesn't. Indeed, Shaft rarely tells Vic anything substantive as the story develops. Vic more or less just follows along, trying to pick up the pieces that Shaft leaves in his strident wake. In spite of his allegorical role as the Western hero, holding the line and preventing the chaos and disorder of society's underbelly from bubbling up and overturning the whole thing, Shaft's complexity is born out in the form of motivations that are never explicitly stated, except by Hayes when he tells us, from the top, that he "would risk his neck for his brother man." Vic may admire Shaft, and, to a certain extent, Shaft may even respect and admire Vic, but Vic's investment doesn't run both ways. Shaft may not have a sufficiently radical imagination for his old buddy Ben, but it is perhaps simply Shaft's recognition that the conventional (white) authorities - especially the police - are themselves perils, rather than servants of the black community, that certifies his heroic authenticity. He works, by personal necessity, with the police. But he more often plays the folk hero, trying to get the police to work for him, and often at their own expense.
Much like his many white antecedents, Shaft's posture of self-interest is both true to himself, while also being a formal necessity of his business, all the while masking an enduring kernel of sentimentality. That struggle between cynicism and sentiment is made all the more enigmatic and compelling by its racial underpinnings. Shaft may act like he's only out for himself, and, to a certain extent, he may only be out for himself; for his own seat, as Ben would have it, at the white man's table. But he is also always, even preternaturally so, fighting on the behalf of his "brother man"; for an ill-defined connection between his own material self-interests and the oft-neglected emotional self-interest, his very confidence and power moored to a sense of collective identification.
Needless to say, most of these thematic and emotional subtleties were lost on contemporary critics of the film, regardless of whether or not their final appraisal of the film was positive, negative, or somewhere in the middle. But there's just as much risk today that those same subtleties will fail to be properly appreciated.
At the time of its release, Parks was explicit in his seeing Shaft primarily as a work of entertainment. His ambitions from a sociological perspective, so far as he had any, was for himself, as a black director, to give a new generation of black youth something that he never got to have growing up in the '30s and '40s, which was a hero like Buck Jones, Humphrey Bogart, or Clark Gable, but who was also black. Even in adapting the original 1970 novel by Ernest Tidyman, a white author who co-wrote the screenplay but was unhappy with the final film, Parks and another white co-writer, John D.F. Black, significantly stripped both the narrative and the character of a sense of Shaft's internal conflict. The filmmakers nixed Tidyman's description of Shaft's "saddle-stitch scar" over his left eye, toned down his vulgarity and hostility, and cast Roundtree. Despite protestations of power, this younger, cleaner-cut figure is all too clearly not that of a city-bred hustler-turned-gumshoe, but has rather come down from the comparatively sheltered suburbs of New Rochelle, molded by a college football career and modeling work. In a rather progressive move for the time, the hysterical homophobia of Tidyman's protagonist is not only not acknowledged, but written out entirely. When the sissy white bartender Rollie (Rex Robbins) gives Shaft a pinch on the tuchus, our hero is neither violent nor offended, simply amused. With enough violence, vulgarity, and tacky sex scenes to earn its "R" rating, Shaft and its protagonist are nonetheless more coy, playful, even sanitized than many contemporary works of crime fiction; which is to say, contemporary works by white filmmakers and starring white actors. Unlike Klute and The French Connection from the same year, the latter even written by Tidyman, Shaft is not pessimistic or emotionally intensive in its narrative or in the development of its characters. It is not a neo-noir film, or even technically a noir, but an even more classic, hardboiled action-mystery. That it is not intensive in nature has further contributed to the sense that it lacks subtlety or depth. And though none of these factors are necessarily explicitly connected with themes of race, they nonetheless contribute to the sense that, as Roger Greenspun wrote in his contemporary review, Shaft is a film "with racial overtones, though, really, no racial undertones"; that, as Parks intended, it is expressly a work of juvenile entertainment, not a "serious" work of art that draws upon, rather than simply capitalizing upon or exploiting, black experience.
Just as with Van Peebles' Baadasssss Song and the explosion in black-oriented films that was to follow in 1972, Shaft became the target of a deeply divided, but nonetheless highly complex, even unpredictable cultural and political reaction. No doubt the film's most vehement critic was Clayton Riley, a cultural critic for The Amsterdam News and sometime contributor of a "black perspective" to The New York Times. Earlier that year, Riley had found himself on the opposite side of a critical establishment that had pilloried both the aesthetics and politics of Sweet Sweetback from both the right and left, the anti-radical voices of white liberals mingling with the chastisement of black writers ranging from the Left-leaning Lerone Bennett of Ebony magazine to the bourgeois conservative A.S. "Doc" Young in the Los Angeles Sentinel. With the release of Shaft, a major studio production, activist concern was much more muted, and response from both black and white cultural critics, overall, much more positive. But if Riley's contemporaries joined him in acknowledging the technical shortcomings of the film, he went above and beyond them in terms of excoriating both the film's concept and what he saw as its reactionary political underpinnings. While acknowledging his admiration for director Gordon Parks - most famous at this time for being a still photographer for Life magazine, as well as a composer and writer who, Riley says, "does so many things so very well" - he nonetheless derides Shaft as a technical "disaster... that lacks both style and substance." Going further, he not only criticized the filmmakers' non-intensive approach to the story - "the lives of the characters and the texture of the Black experience go unexplored" - but also rejected the basis of that story itself out-of-hand, deriding Shaft as merely the re-invocation of an out-dated archetype of Hollywood's "tranquilizing mythologies," exploiting the desire for black escapism while offering whites, not unlike Lieutenant Vic, an appeasing vehicle for nostalgia and vicarious thrills:
"Shaft, the private detective, is patently unreal... Unreal because the private investigator was exposed by the films and film critics of the late sixties as a champion of nothing but his own petty interests. The Sam Spade syndrome crumbled before our eyes as the private dicks of the world were revealed as a hairy tribe of conniving shysters and sadistic, drunken bullies...
"There is no way a contemporary New York film audience could sit through Shaft without realizing this. What makes it all right is the fact that Shaft is Black, and what is more logical in America than a handsome and intelligent Black man picking up the leavings, the broken down legacy of some distant fantasy figures like the Shadow or Mr. Kean, Tracer of Lost Persons?"
By the summer of the following year, before the term "blaxploitation" had even entered the popular lexicon, Riley had even harsher words for the "black movie boom" that followed the tripartite success of Davis, Van Peebles, and Parks's films:
"Under the devious guise of providing the Black American with a new and positive image of his/her life, these films confer upon the viewer, Black or White, little more than a pretended glamour and sophistication, the empty, repetitive wasteland of ancient Hollywood traditionalism... The new Black cinema is currently running with more defects than virtues, not the least of which has been the unwillingness of Black filmmakers - actors, directors and screenwriters included - to deal with Black life in serious terms. All the films... are either shapeless comedies or fantasies composed of wishful thinking on social issues and even more imaginary erotic daydreaming. From the experienced Sidney Poitier to newcomer Christopher St. John... we are seeing Black films make of Black life a comic-strip procession of dead philosophies that are empty and meaningless."
If Riley saw Shaft primarily as a "soothing falsehood," he couldn't help it if the positive notices that the film received from established white critics tended to echo his criticisms from an approving point-of-view. All but universally, critics agreed that filmmaking was not Gordon Park's strong suit. On the other hand, Vincent Canby of The New York Times made himself one of the film's greatest champions by directly appealing to the desire of movie-goers, black and white, to see "a good Saturday night movie," at a time when "so many movies... are as uncertain of their identities as the most neurotic members of their audiences." While only nominally touching upon the film's "casual reference" to the detective yarns of the past, Canby nonetheless directly appeals to the kind of magnetic "vitality" of Parks' film, despite its flaws, because of the ways in which it appeases nostalgic notions of how the movies, particularly the "B" programmers and genre films, somehow used to be better because of some vague notion that audiences, critics, and filmmakers alike were more assured in their sense of identity. While at once praising Parks in his aspiration to serve a previously ignored black audience a fantasy from which they had been historically excluded, his conclusion cannot help but devolve into "colorblind talk," another example of what Riley might call a "tranquilizing mythology" that mutes one's awareness of the still unexplored characters and texture of "the Black experience":
"In the case of Shaft, the vitality is so freshly vulgar, so without solemnity except for its observance of private eye conventions (which are not exactly solemn to start with), that the movie becomes the kind of entertainment to which any audience - black, white or you-name-it - can respond. I suppose it's the same sort of vitality that kept black audiences responding to white, assembly-line movies during all of those decades past when to be black was not so beautiful, but invisible."
For Canby, as for Greenspun, race was an "overtone" of Shaft, but not an "undertone." "Blackness" in the film was largely aesthetic and superlative. Where they and Riley dissented from one another was only in whether or not that was a good thing; whether or not the lack of depth in Parks's motivations was to be praised or to be castigated along with his technical incompetency.
The reception of Shaft inevitably becomes another haunted lesson in how things can change a lot while fundamentally remaining the same. As in Riley and Canby's time, the retrenchment of the white middle-class into their suburban homes to watch their boob tubes (ever smaller and flatter) has resulted in a cycle of cinema that more proactively and deliberately attempts to tailor stories and the kinds of faces that appear on the screen to not only a POC demographic still more likely to go to the movies, but also to a more diverse audience overall, where even whites, increasingly neurotic and uncertain of their own identities, desire to vicariously be a part of something that seems more confident, whole, and vital than it actually is. In reality, though - and this is the only place where some "colorblind talk" seems to be warranted - everyone is neurotic, divided, and alienated regardless of phenotype. Just as with the outbreak of "new black cinema" in the '70s - soon to be the "Blaxploitation" cycle - our own contemporary cycle of black-oriented popular film and television begun sometime in the 2010s, in terms of its reception, is fraught with polemical disagreement of its social function and meaning. Regardless of critical consensus, box-office success, or Oscars acknowledgment, a black-oriented work is as much likely to be a critical progressive victory for some or a white supremacist psyop for another, and sometimes both for both, the disagreement really only occurring on the level of valuation rather than definition. Just as with the new black cinema of the '70s, as hot new artistic voices finally got to shoot their shot or veteran stars of color took their turns behind the camera, so too have movements in representation in millennial black cinema been seen by some as self-sufficient in terms of their ambitions; whereas others would beg to differ, taking the Clayton Riley stance of staunchly opposing the aspirational fantasism of contemporary genre films. And as in the '70s, this binary opposition itself is a drastic over-simplification. The neuroses of our times is reflected in so many more minutely complex and sometimes even self-contradictory ways.
As in the '70s black film cycle, this crisis of meaning is both conceptually and materially endemic. As A.S. "Doc" Young noted in his article on Lerone Bennett's negative appraisal of Sweetback, part of the problem is not so much that we lack "colorblindness" - we should perceive and foreground the very real, material ramifications of a racist hierarchy - but rather that we are "enslaved by the flawed, faddish mythology of black" at any given point. Our obsession with identity, not as a socially useful category, but rather as a defining essence of who we are, is both our greatest emotional asset as well as our most problematic fantasy. And as with the '70s black film cycle, though the millennial black film has certainly shown to have stronger legs, the more sophisticated and distilled pandering to our obsessions will inevitably crater both the overall quality as well as the artistic vitality of the so-called "black film."
Only able to perceive Shaft through the veil of time, we nonetheless access its vitality not only as a piece of entertainment, but also as a work where the artistic dimensions of it, and the deeper motivations behind it, far exceeded the grasp of its director's stated ambitions. We also perceive, in retrospect, that same art and ambition already at the precipice of being deferred by the cynicism of "Blaxploitation."
Make no mistake: Shaft is, in some ways, a technical disaster. In particular, the editing and mixing of the soundtrack is abhorrent. The ambience and acoustics of the location photography proves a constant problem in terms of being able to discern what the characters are evening saying, and attempts at dubbing are generally poorly executed and unconvincing. Even with a background in photography, there are places in which Parks's visual instincts come up short. There are several shots in the film where the camera will zoom in or out from a subject, only for this movement to be abruptly cut short of what was clearly supposed to be a longer, more dramatic shot in a more slowly paced scene. One wonders if the film was even storyboarded, but Parks's direction suggests impromptu decision-making, initial creative choices that just didn't cut together in the editing room. When viewed on a small screen, one especially has to wonder how such an apparently cheap product from a major studio managed to keep racking up marathon packed crowds from 10:30 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. the next day.
Then again, one doesn't have to wonder for long. Word-of-mouth would kill a rickety production like Shaft nowadays, or the distributor would simply bury the embarrassment. But whatever M-G-M skimped out on in terms of its finance-and-distribution deal, it pulled out all the stops for it in terms of publicity, retaining Communiplex, a nation-wide network of black-owned marketing firms, to provide national advertising, public relations, and market counseling services for perhaps the first major studio film all-but exclusively advertised too black audiences. Hotter than Bond, Cooler than Bullitt, this was Shaft, with music composed by "Hot Buttered Soul Man" Isaac Hayes. The T.V. advert had one of the best, most cynically calculating stingers of all time, aimed directly at the under-17 audience despite the film's "R" rating: "If you wanna see Shaft, ask your Mama." Whether white or black, from conservative to militant Left, you could pretty much all agree that Shaft, like its immediate predecessors, was thriving, at very little expense, on the dollars thrown at it primarily by an oppressed group starved not of the realities of "the Black experience," but precisely those fantasies that Riley neglected, which are no less important in terms of constructing a sense of meaning.
So it was not with charity but with real reverence that I really appreciated that, when I actually got to see Richard Roundtree towering above Midtown on the big screen, that I was not overlooking Parks's technical failings, but that I was rather marveling at absolutely everything he did right. In a far more restrained review than Canby's, Roger Greenspun acknowledged that Parks's background in still photography seemed to greatly inform his approach to moving pictures: "Shaft demonstrates a... respect for forms, and for formal good looks... so that much of the time it has the visual style of a Life magazine photographic essay - though its dramatic logic is all Flash Gordon." I think this is precisely right, but somehow still undersells it. Whether it's the pastel colors of Greenwich Village cafes and poster shops or the inside of a Harlem tenement, Parks and Furrer's cinematography is veritably baroque. Despite the omnipresent, decaying grays of the concrete jungle, the film invites us in sensually, not with just the conventional chiaroscuro lighting of noir, but rather with a rich layering of warm colors. Rather than merely copying an aesthetic of brutal, obvious oppositions, Parks builds upon the visual language of the urban crime and detective film by emphasizing a quaintness, charm, and seduction in his own visual narrative.
And the narrative of Shaft is primarily visual, even if its punchy dialogue and Parks's apparent disinterest in formal perfectionism doesn't always make it appear as such. Shaft has a style, but it is not, for the most part, stylized. Its warm, sensual form is not an invitation to marvel at the forms themselves alone. It is, rather, formalist to the degree of captivating our attention so that we follow these forms allegorically, perceiving that the journey of John Shaft, despite all its high concept trappings, becomes a photographic essay striding back-and-forth across worlds of black, white, and integration at a juncture of critical contemporary transformation of the American urban landscape. Shaft is a chauvinistic fiction, but he is no less an authentic (nor problematic) chauvinistic fantasy than Van Peebles' Sweetback. And, to put it simply, fantasies and myths matter.
The nostalgia of Shaft, Parks's nostalgia for the white Western heroes who he latched onto as a child in lieu of a black complement, is imprinted upon the film from very emergence of its title star from the literal underground of a literal "film scene," the Forty Deuce grindhouse stretch. Without a word, the film announces itself proudly as a "B" programmer, Hayes's score driving Roundtree through the real throng of the real New York in a living mythology incorporated into the real-world environment. Its sensual exuberance and thematic confidence despite revealing so comparatively little in terms of who Shaft is, what he is doing, why we should care about him, poses an immediate challenge to the dysfunction reflected in the grittier, bigger-budget offerings of the white-dominated Hollywood Renaissance and all their ennui. The nostalgia of Shaft is anthemic, yes. But it also proves, in a broader cinematic context, defiantly counter-cultural. This is nostalgia with a strange purpose of forward momentum, Parks and Roundtree deliberately modeling Shaft as a vehicle for allegorically portraying the spirit of, as Parks wrote in a New York Times article from December 17, 1972, "young black people, now in the heat of revolt." Eschewing emotional intensiveness, Parks instead masters our identification not just with a character, but with the world of the film itself as a vital reflection of both social realities as well as the fantasies that structure our perceptions of reality. Shaft requires his mythic powers because his constant movement is essential to defining the contours and borders of spaces, to exploring those vast dimensions of the black experience in a way that makes it emotionally accessible.
To conclude that Shaft was a work with no racial undertones was, of course, patently absurd. The polemic of the film is as immediate as Roundtree's costume and hair. A fantastic article by Chas H. Loeb of the black-owned newspaper Call and Post from April, 1971 notes the importance of finding a look for Shaft that was "not-too-mod, not-too-Brooks Brothers," including "a moderate, well-shaped natural hair-style" that was somewhere in-between a "conservative, close-cut job" or a "full-blown Afro." Even visually-speaking, Shaft is presented to us as in moderate terms. He may be a wild card to the white authorities, but his strident individualism also marks him as an opponent of the anti-establishment nationalism and collectivism modeled by Ben Bufford and his ragtag bunch. The implications throughout the narrative are obvious. Whereas Shaft has pulled himself up by his bootstraps, Ben is still stuck in Harlem. When Shaft first walks in upon their meeting place, he discovers them in satirical poses emphasizing their juvenile preoccupations, wine on the table, one smoking, another teasing out his 'fro, all the while nobody actually saying or doing anything. Less like a big brother than a father-figure, Shaft easily seizes command when shit goes south, and in another chauvinistic injury to Ben's radical pride, while being hidden away in the apartment of one of Shaft's side-pieces, he's forced to sleep in her daughter's pink and fluffy bedroom. The film exudes a patronizing, condescending view of black radicalism, in spite of Parks' stated faith in the spirit of youth "in the heat of revolt." Intending solely to make an entertaining story, he reveals much more about a certain point of view, one more consistent with a kind of bourgeois black conservatism, stressing not the systemic "slavery" under which black people still suffer, but rather the "slave mentality" that keeps them from improving on themselves and practically dealing with the world as it is. Not only the inter-racial, but more especially the intra-racial conflicts that occur within Shaft are, ultimately, allegorical of the very real schisms in how to define, understand, or build upon the so-called "black experience."
At the same time, just as with the irreducibility of that so-called "black experience," Shaft proves not so easily reducible. Parks may draw upon his nostalgia for the archetype of Western heroes past, but that nostalgia is modified by a perspective of systematic exclusion. The fact that he and Van Peebles' ushered in a cycle of "B" programmers starring "superblack" heroes who triumphed at around the same time that the films of the Hollywood Renaissance were spiraling into paranoia, pessimism, and existential dread points up, for whatever Canby may have felt sure of, the lack of any kind of "colorblind" accessibility to Shaft. As Hollie I. West would later comment in a Washington Post piece in October, 1972, there was no getting around the fact that, however much the new black cinema of the '70s may have been front-loaded by cynical attempts to capitalize upon and exploit black audiences, their embedded appeal was, far from Riley's assertions about Shaft, that they rejected the previous, prevailing assumption of the neutral white gaze. However cheap or tacky, these were films for black audiences and, on occasion, they "assigned values to attitudes - racial and moral - that the white (and black) establishment" resisted. With the "Blaxploitation" boom, this valuation of previously resisted attitudes could include the romanticization of pimps and pushers as tragic anti-heroes in Super Fly and The Mack, for whom the term "Blaxploitation" was practically invented. Or it could be the unambiguous framing of black militancy, far from the trepidation of Shaft, as an ultimately positive development in black communities, as in Jack Hill's vigilante lady-cop flick Foxy Brown.
But even in the prototypical case of Shaft, despite its apparent conservatism - or, perhaps more accurately, the libertarian spirit that its new Western hero embodies - there is frankly a very obvious valuation of things as simple as the fact that, while Shaft may have "sold out," he has not quite "assimilated." Like the outlaw heroes of the revisionist Western, he walks that thin line, but ultimately works implicitly on the behalf of the downtrodden. And in this modified incarnation of the archetypal Western figure, he specifically makes life Hell for pretty much everyone who makes life for those simple folks harder, including and especially The Man, regardless of whether he's a mafioso or a cop. Parks' lack of an intensive approach, the fact that there isn't a lot of insight into who Shaft is or why, means that a lot of the subtlety of his heroic characterization is inevitably lost on those for whom the film simply wasn't made, an echo of Parks' own conflicted feelings of identifying with heroic paradigms from which he was nonetheless excluded by default. Canby and Riley both provide intriguing insights, and also betray lapses in attention to aesthetic or social details. But it is ultimately Riley who is just flat out wrong when he concludes that Shaft's allegorical role is to pick up the leavings of a broken-down white fantasy. By the end of the film, Shaft has made an awful mess of things. All his brother men - Ben and the radicals - have survived, and he laughs raucously at the idea of Vic having to clean up after him. What white man could look at Roundtree laying down this "super heavy black number" and conclude that this was a spectacle for everybody? Canby probably spent more time watching the audience than the film itself.
The way you know that there's something more going on under the hood of Shaft, besides merely its bold assertion from the drop, is precisely that it doesn't get too hung up on intensive exploration of "the black experience," whatever that is. If there is a definitive black experience, even for utility's sake, perhaps it's captured in the fact that the narrative of the film is, at the end of the day, structured upon our hero just kind of bouncing off the walls of a world that was built too small for him, never really showing his cards, especially not to the white cops he keeps strung out on a line of desperation. If there is a subtlety, a substance to the film, it is conveyed in contrasts that Parks never really dwells upon because, even in his modest ambitions of making brisk and inspiring entertainment, he hopes that his target audience will take them for granted. It's right there when Vic and his men show up to another crime scene, more bodies of white mobsters waiting for them, no hints but the assurance that "Shaft Wuz Here"; and standing by, saying nothing, stolid like a lawn gnome, is a beat cop whose lean uniform is tailored so tight it's a wonder that his ribcage isn't shattering. The only black man in the room, his robotic subservience underscore precisely why Shaft, on the other hand, becomes such a perfect, effortless vehicle for something that, while perhaps not truly revolutionary, is still compellingly transgressive and inspiring.
Derived from "traditionally white" archetypes, Shaft is also a more classical kind of hero, in that his heroism is not defined by his moral character, but rather by his unique capacity to achieve extraordinary things at a certain critical moment. He is also, for what it's worth, clearly a trickster figure, informed just as deeply by definitively black archetypes of folk heroism that are even further removed from the pretentious virtues of white oppressors. He's an outlaw, by nature, in a white world. As John W. Roberts might have it, he's the "badman." Or, better yet, in the film's contemporary vernacular, he's "one bad mother."
Synthesizing centuries of mythic influence colliding across continents, it is certainly possible for this figure to have a kind of transcendent accessibility. But by the time that Shaft, ever the clever trickster, is having the black militants dress up as hotel servants and fighting off the white gangsters with a firehose of all things, it's clear that the sense of reality and experience that his myth structures is much more personally tailored than that. You just can't put Shaft in a uniform, give him his mark, tell him where to stand and say, "It's the same part. Doesn't matter the color." He's got the monkey suit off, now. He's going places. Keep up if you really wanna see some shit.
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