To call the first Shaft movie a blaxploitation movie is somewhat of an insult. The word hadn’t been coined yet and it wouldn’t come into the vernacular until late summer of 1972. Shaft told the story of a private detective hired to track down the kidnapped daughter of a Harlem mobster. It’s a crime action thriller no different than Bullitt or Dirty Harry which were also popular at the time. The only difference is the main character is an African-American.
Richard Roundtree was the first African-American action star in a movie that would forever change Hollywood for the past 50 years. The movie is notable for Isaac Hayes’ Oscar-winning song “Theme from Shaft” as well as the music for which Hayes was also nominated. Those cymbal beats followed by a funky bass guitar riff made it memorable almost immediately as it played over the opening credits as John Shaft (Roundtree) walked through Time Square and suddenly became a movie icon.
Roundtree was only 28 when the movie opened. Directed by Gordon Parks and produced on a small budget of $500,000, it ended up making $12 million, which wasn’t too bad. The movie might have had the word-of-mouth success of Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback Baadasssss’ Song which had been released earlier that year to an amazing success considering it was produced cheaply and only opened at only one theater in Detroit. Movies were made now being made by African-American directors, written by African-American writers, starring African-American actors and for African-American audiences.
Unlike Sweetback, Shaft had the support of a major Hollywood studio, MGM, who used UniWorld Group, a public relations firm that was able to market it well for the African-American community. Also, John Shaft is a more three-dimensional character as opposed to Sweetback. It was a new era in filmmaking. For decades, most African-American characters were playing goofy characters (i.e. ministrel role), the help or bad guys. Seeing Shaft stroll through Time Square in a leather jacket, it was obvious he was the hero. And just as seeing Nichelle Nichols as Uhura in Star Trek inspired a young Whoopi Goldberg and other young African-American women, a lot of African-American finally got to see someone positive.
There were two other Shaft movies, Shaft’s Big Score and Shaft in Africa, and he appeared in the big-budget disaster flick Earthquake. But the third Shaft movie failed to be a success at the box office unlike the previous two. By the mid-1970s, the Blaxploitation genre was almost becoming comical with movies like Blackenstein and Dolemite. Even James Bond went the Blaxploitation route with Live and Let Die where Agent 007 is called a “honky.”
Roundtree continued to work in movies and TV throughout the rest of his life. He repreised the role of John Shaft in the 2000 reboot/sequel Shaft with Samuel L. Jackson as well as the 2019 movie. He appeared in a glorifed cameo as the district attorney in Se7en. But a lot of his movie roles were in less stellar movies. He had a good role in the recent comedy-drama Moving On in which he showed he still at it as an octogenarian. On TV, he appeared in Roots, the Biblical miniseries A.D. and had a recurring role on the hit TV show Desparate Housewives.
But what he did outside the 160-plus acting credits is more crucial. Roundtree along with filmmaker Parks, who also directed Shaft’s Big Score, proved that there was an audience for strong African-American characters in TV and movies. Filmmakers Spike Lee, John Singleton (who directed the 2000 version), F. Gary Gray, Antonie Fuqua, Ryan Coogler, Barry Jenkins and many more along with actors Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Jackson, Wesley Snipes, Will Smith, Eddie Murphy, Forrest Whitaker, Michael B. Jordan, Danny Glover, Laurence Fishburne, Jamie Foxx and so many more all owe some debt to Roundtree. He walked so they could all run.
Roundtree would win a Peabody Award for the 2002 documentary The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. In 1993, he would be diagnosed with breast cancer and became an advocate for breast cancer awareness in men. He reportedly passed away on Oct. 24 from pancreatic cancer. He was 81. I’m not going to shut my mouth because he was one bad motherfucker.
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Zane Says 