Criterion Blu-ray Film Review

Shaft (1971) • Blu-ray [Criterion Collection]

A black private detective in 1970s New York investigates a Mafia kidnapping.

More than 50 years after Shaft helped make blaxploitation mainstream (and rescued MGM from a financial crisis), the initially surprising thing is what an unradical film it seems. This is a relatively conventional gumshoe movie, just as the source novel by Ernest Tidyman is fairly conventional in its style, and even if the casting of a black man in the lead would still be slightly unusual today, it’s now far from unfamiliar.

Even for its era, Gordon Parks’s film is certainly at the more respectable end of blaxploitation — -much less politically assertive than Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song from the same year, for example. And it’s clearly designed to appeal to white audiences as well as black ones: witness, for instance, the way the dialogue has just enough street slang to feel excitingly realistic but never so much that it risks becoming incomprehensible, or the importance placed on the relationship between John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) and white…