Isaac Hayes: Theme From Shaft (Soundtrack Sundays)

Who’s the cat that won’t cop out when there’s danger all about?

John Shaft? Damn right.

Gordon Parks’ Shaft was a very important movie. A game changer even.

In an era of Black Panther and when 007 is supposedly about to morph into a black woman, it might be difficult to appreciate the impact that Shaft made on popular culture in 1971. Here was the first American action film from a major studio with a black man in the lead role. It received some great reviews and proved to be box-office gold. According to Time, it was made on a budget of only $500,000 but grossed $13 million.

This success encouraged other big studios, and independent production companies to grab their own slice of blaxploitation action.

Some have claimed that Shaft isn’t strictly blaxploitation as the Shaft novel that it is based on was written by a white man Ernest Tidyman with the character of Shaft in that being white too. The film’s director, though, was black. Its lead actor was black, and the man who composed its legendary score was also black. Not only that but the man who helped Tidyman write the screenplay was John D.F. Black.

Okay, he was white.

In Britain, cop and detective films and shows tend to kick off with some awful aural wallpaper that almost seems to tell us not to get our hopes up too high, nothing very exciting is gonna happen here.

Shaft opens in the middle of NYC. Skyscrapers. Bustling streets. Noise. One man emerges from the subway. This is, of course, Shaft and within seconds we realise that he’s a superfly guy, strutting between cars on 42nd Street as if fear was a concept that was alien to him.

Even better is the music accompanying this with Bar-Kay Willie Hall’s distinctive hi-hats and Charles Pitt’s chikka-chikka-wacka wah-wah, maybe the funkiest little riff ever recorded. And then those swirling symphonic soul strings!

Isaac Hayes’ Theme From Shaft is a masterpiece. The sound of an American metropolis, bursting with vitality and modernity. Danger lies ahead and plenty of thrills are surely guaranteed.

Arguably this is the finest theme song of the 1970s, and also arguably the best track Stax ever released. It reached number one in America for a couple of weeks at the tail end of 1971 and won the 1972 Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Shaft without the theme tune just wouldn’t be as good. The plot is a fairly standard hardboiled detective story involving a turf war between some black criminals based in Harlem and the Italian Mafia, which results in a kidnapping of one crime lord’s daughter and Shaft being tasked to find her.

Too black for the force, too blue for his brothers, Shaft operates between both sides of the law. He’s highly likeable, but he also has his faults. Despite having a girlfriend, he picks up and sleeps with a woman who he meets in a Greenwich Village bar. As she later puts it: ‘You’re pretty good in the sack, but you’re pretty shitty afterwards. You know that?’

Shaft is also a fascinating time capsule of New York as the 1970s are getting underway – from the cinema billboard advertising Get Carter (another film with a cracking theme song) and a poster announcing a Four Tops concert to those sharp sideburns, moustache, and tan leather coat worn by Shaft. And Richard Roundtree is just about perfect as the eponymous hero.

Its success persuaded ailing studio MGM to knock out a couple of quick sequels, Shaft’s Big Score! (1972), and Shaft in Africa (1973). By the time the latter was released, the blaxploitation floodgates had truly opened, with a raft of movies playing theatres, drive-ins and grindhouses across America every night of every week.

Some of these movies like Superfly and Coffy were terrific watches. Others like Blackenstein and Disco Godfather were rank rotten with 1974’s Three Tough Guys and Truck Turner (both scored and starring Isaac Hayes) somewhere in between.

In October 1973, Shaft became a CBS TV series. Compared to the movies, this was a toned down Shaft. No longer any kind of renegade, Shaft was now happily co-operating with cops. The violence was toned down and the bad language disappeared. Predictably, with nearly all the things that fans liked about the films gone, the series didn’t last long. And that looked to be the end of Shaft.

On paper, Shaft 2000 must have looked like a wonderful idea. Name of a fondly remembered, iconic film? Tick. Classic theme tune? Tick. Box office actor that could have been born to play the lead? Make that another tick.

In reality, there’s little reason for this using the Shaft name for this John Singleton directed movie, other than to trade in on the brand and re-use the music. Okay, Richard Roundtree notches up a few minute’s screentime to provide some continuity, the idea being that he is the uncle and mentor of sorts to Samuel L’s Shaft II, a NYPD detective. Uncle Shaft is hardly essential to the plot, though, albeit it’s always nice to see Roundtree onscreen.

I’m guessing that if, a poll was conducted at the start of our new century to find out who the public considered the coolest man alive, then Sam L might well have topped that poll. He demonstrates his charisma here, but the dialogue is never Tarantino sharp and he struggles to match the magnetism of his persona in Pulp Fiction. Not only that, but he just isn’t as cool as Richard Roundtree in the original.

The plot tries to be ultra-smart but is often pretty dumb. It revolves around racist rich kid Walter Wade (Christian Bale channeling some of the obnoxiousness of American Psycho‘s Patrick Bateman) killing a young black man and Diane Palmieri (Toni Collette), who witnesses the murder but denies having done so. She really should have checked the giant mirror in the bar where she works to see if she had wiped all the blood from her face, or Shaft might not have known she was lying about not seeing anything.

Soon any traces of believability vanish as we’re introduced to Latino crime boss Peeples, a caricature bad guy, surrounded by cartoonish idiots.

By the hour mark, I was growing bored. There are few things more tedious than gun fight after gun fight unless someone as gifted as John Woo is choreographing the shootouts and Singleton is no Woo. Even worse are the ‘twists’, such as when female cop Vanessa Williams reappears after being seemingly shot dead. Did anyone in any audience in the world not see that coming?

Don’t expect subtlety and definitely don’t expect character arcs. Like his uncle, this John Shaft is a sex machine with all the chicks: smart, charismatic, heroic with badass patter that no criminal can compete with. He’s flawless when we first see him and flawless when we’re again treated to some of Isaac Hayes’ classic (and re-recorded) theme as the closing credits kick in. Followed by some R. Kelly dirge.

This is a dumbed down Shaft, made for the wrong reasons and lacking the grit and the charm of the original.

My original plan for this post had been to go and see the latest instalment of the franchise which features John Shaft, John Shaft II and his son John ‘JJ’ Shaft Jr, an FBI agent. On finding out that this was even more comedic in tone than the 2000 version, I couldn’t muster up the necessary enthusiasm to go see it.

Why reward Hollywood for lazily dishing up stale reboots and uninspired remakes and sequels? And while I’m not very interested in James Bond – the last time I paid into to see 007, Roger Moore was jumping over crocodiles – maybe the producers of Bond 25 should ask themselves what are the benefits for fans of that franchise in taking out what the character has always been about?

Getting back to Isaac Hayes and that 1971 soundtrack, here’s the Black Moses live at 1972’s Wattstax Festival. Dig that psychedelic pimp cape and chain mail vest!

For more on the recently released deluxe Shaft soundtrack, click here.