Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971)

When a gang boss's daughter goes missing, he hires private eye John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) to find her.

With tensions growing, and the police smelling blood, Shaft is under the gun to get the child back before more lives are endangered...

I first knew of this movie from seeing the poster in one of my teacher’s classrooms as a small child. It must have been around the time of the remake because I have a vague memory of thinking they were the same movie. 

What is there to say about Shaft? 

This was my first viewing and my reaction was probably the same as most other people.

As soon as Isaac Hayes’ music hit and the title card zoomed on the screen, I was hooked. 

Richard Roundtree is an instant movie star, and Parks gives him the perfect introduction. After picking him up in the wide, Parks cuts to low angle close up looking up at him. 

I was so struck by this opening, I had to go back and rewatch it a few times.

Roundtree’s Shaft has become such an archetype, it is important to remember how much of a seachange he represented in mainstream Hollywood. 

While less radical than Melvin Van Peeples’ revolutionary Sweetback, John Shaft is not working within the system like Sidney Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs (In The Heat of the Night). 

He is shown to be at ease with the various strata he has to navigate, and he shows no obvious fear of or deference for the police. 

Shaft is also highly aware of the different power dynamics at play in this city, and the stakes his case presents to the safety of Harlem.

While Roundtree is great, the performance of the movie is Moses Gunn as gangster Bumpy Jonas. Slipping between desperate father and calculating mastermind, he is a fantastic, ambiguous foil for Shaft. 

Jonas’s presence also sets up an ideological conflict with the younger revolutionaries he holds responsible for the kidnapping. While his products are considered illegal, the gangster is a capitalist, purely interested in accumulating wealth. 

Ultimately, it is these same revolutionaries who help Shaft in his final rescue.    

Shaft is not a movie overly concerned with plot - its mechanics are familiar, but the way in which Shaft navigates them is what makes it more unique. The fact that he shows no interest in bringing in the police when he needs the cavalry - a sentiment which remains relevant in the current era of militarised policing - is significant. 

While the song rhapsodises his potency, I was surprised he had a girlfriend. 

This woman, Ellie (Gwenn Mitchell), is only a minor part of the film, and Shaft’s interest appears to be self-serving. Aside from an early sex scene, we - and Shaft - do not see her until he needs her help. He is also shown hooking up a white woman he casually  meets during his investigation - indeed, it turns out to be a bit too casual. Shaft dismisses her so bluntly, she cusses him out. 

Shaft’s misogyny appears to be an aftereffect - in trying to present him as the opposite of characters like more restrained Tubbs, Shaft tips over into perpetuating the same callousness as other white sexual superheroes like James Bond. It is the one real dated part of the film. 

One other thing I found surprising about the character is that he is fallible and physically vulnerable. His first attempt to rescue the girl is a failure, and he is seriously wounded. These kinds of setbacks are not new for thrillers (particularly in the Seventies), but I was impressed by how close to curtains Shaft comes. 

It is so rare nowadays for a main character to be shown hurt or at a physical disadvantage, and it shows how far perceptions in Hollywood have shifted in terms of how action heroes are portrayed.

Ultimately, despite his many strengths, Shaft is not a one-man army, and he cannot deflect bullets. 

 The third act of the film almost changes genres, as Shaft and his team infiltrate the villains’ hideout dressed as staff, before ambushing them and affecting a rescue. It is a fun scene, but what takes it over the top is the button.

If the opening of Shaft is the birth of an icon, the ending cements him into immortality.

Rescue complete, Shaft leaves the villains’ hideout as the familiar theme kicks back and he saunters across the street as though nothing just happened.

At a payphone, he advises his cop pal to tie up the loose ends and heads off laughing into the night. Brilliant.

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OUT NOW: Rental Family (Hikari, 2025)

Struggling actor Philip (Brendan Fraser) is hired for a company that specialises in a very specific kind of performance: actors playing roles in clients' lives - from friends to lovers to family members.

Most of the people are lonely and are looking for company; others are looking for someone to take a more active role. 

As he struggles with the impact he is having on strangers' lives, Philip finds himself forced to confront the absences in his own life...

I really enjoyed this movie. I watched it last month, thinking it would make a nice break from all the action movies from last year, but then I didn’t feel motivated enough to polish it.

I left the movie having enjoyed it, but distrusted my own feelings. Mostly because it is a story set in Japan centred around a white man. Is he a saviour figure?

It feels reductive to think of the movie this way, but I also do not want to discount it.

The other question I had was about Brendan Fraser.

It is impossible not to see in Phillip’s redemption, Fraser’s own comeback story. 

With his big eyes and open face, Fraser is a great anchor for this movie. He brings a tired, understated sense of loss.

In an early scene, he looks out at the apartment windows opposite his room, at the glimpses of other lives - people meeting friends and lovers. While he is a gaijin, an outsider, it is clear Philip’s loneliness is more than just cultural.

He holds the screen but his is not an overwhelming presence - while not a true ensemble piece, he does not overwhelm the rest of the cast.

The story structure is familiar: 

The different clients lead to Philip recognising aspects missing from his own life - he sees these clients as chances to make up for something that is missing in himself.

One of the most intriguing - although understated - elements of the film is Philip’s interactions with a sex worker. She appears in only a few scenes but the parallels are obvious - she is providing a specific kind of intimacy that he cannot find elsewhere. She knows his role better than he does.

To the movie’s credit, it avoids the obvious route of making her a love interest. But it feels like the movie is teasing a theme more than expanding on it.

The key relationships Phil has are with a movie star (Akira Emoto) who is struggling with a lack of purpose and dementia, and a young girl (Shannon Mahina Gorman) in need of a father figure to get into an exclusive private school.

The former forces Phillip to confront the ghost of his father, and his own struggles toward autonomy, while the latter forces him to accept new kinds of responsibility.

Both relationships force Phillip to step outside of himself, and to subordinate himself to the good of the people he is supporting. This is the aspect of the film that endeared it to me, and Fraser’s screen persona is so malleable and empathetic that it works. 

A lovely little film.  

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OUT NOW: Mārama (Taratoa Stappard, 2025)

Mārama (Ariāna Osborne) is a young school teacher who arrives in England, intent on learning the truth about her birth parents from someone who knew them.

After learning her contact has died, Mārama’s journey appears to be over.

Until the wealthy owner of the local manor (Toby Stephens) offers her a place to stay - and reveals a peculiar interest in her home country.

As Mārama is drawn deeper into the family’s world, she begins to see this home as a perverse shrine - and a link to the past she is missing…

I still get a bit of the cultural shudder when it comes to certain kinds of New Zealand films. Usually it is when it is a genre that does not have a large cultural footprint. 

New Zealand has its own gothic tradition. But Mārama is going back to the birthplace of the gothic, the old English Manor.

I was first brought up on New Zealand gothic via Sam Neil’s documentary, Cinema of Unease. 

Made to celebrate the centenary of cinema, it is now a signpost of a particular view of New Zealand film and media as a whole - a particular pakeha point of view, with the unease based in the uncertain relationship with a land it claims mastery over.

It is an unease based on rootlessness, and a lack of roots in Aotearoa. 

Mārama is the inverse - it is based in a longer sense of history, and a deep relationship with the land and its history. 

When the film explicitly references the concept of facing the past while walking into the future, I felt like applauding:  

What a perfect complement to the Gothic, a genre all about the past coming back to haunt the present.

I will admit, at first I was a little weary.

The film starts out with a familiar set-up - a young woman comes to an old house and becomes a part of a wealthy family with some kind of secret.

This secret - which relates to the mystery of Mārama’s parentage - seemed fairly obvious.

That did not matter because the film’s handling of its tone, and the increasing sense of tension, made that almost irrelevant.

Ariāna Osborne’s performance as as the central character seems to be playing off the idea of the ingenue.

I only know her from her role as Tūi on the TV show Madam, but she comes across as fundamentally savvy. 

There is an inherent knowingness to her performance that creates another layer of tension - Mārama is clearly not the innocent waif her hosts believe she is, and it is hard to imagine her becoming their willing pawn. 

Mārama is new to the UK, but she is no stranger in a strange land - she has a familiarity with the Pakeha world and seems to be bidding her time. 

She knows she is at a disadvantage, in terms of power, and some early ceding of ground does seem to align with the familiar archetype of the innocent gothic heroine.

It is this clash, between Mārama and her hosts’ perceptions of her character, which becomes the movie’s time bomb - a slow escalation of tension which culminates in a scene at a party where Mārama is forced to witness a garish, mocking portrayal of Maori culture.

It is a fantastically uneasy sequence that the filmmakers let play out. You can see our heroine’s explosion coming, but the filmmakers delay it to the last possible second, until the inevitable clash between the condescending pretension of Mārama’s hosts and her outrage.

This scene is fantastic - but the third act is where Mārama goes into the stratosphere. New Zealand movies have a hard time reaching for the primal emotions - it is rare that a movie manages to feel unsafe and disturbing.

 

The final reveal of Mārama’s past is a horrifying piece of Grand Guignol, made all the more disturbing by its implications:

Mārama is viewed as a possession, an extension of her (spoilers) father’s own power and ability to master and possess a faraway land.

It is a bloody, visceral take on colonisation. 

It takes a while to get going, but Mārama’s increasingly sure hand with suspense, and its memorable climax are worth it. I am keen to rewatch it, and to see how it plays knowing the ending.

Worth a look.

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Post-script: Enemy Mine (Wolfgang Petersen, 1985)

In 2024, I reviewed Enemy Mine. This is less a review and more of an addendum to that earlier piece - an allegory for tolerance but it is also rather pointed in its criticism of the way different cultures memorialise and preserve their sense of identity and history.

When we are introduced to Davidge, he sees the Dracs in purely black and white terms. He does not recognise them as sentient beings with their own culture or traditions.

Not only does Davidge have to break this assumption, he is forced to realise how little he knows of his own roots. He is able to provide a brief rundown of his parents, but nothing more. 

Davidge is singularly disinterested in dwelling on the past, or looking into the future. 

Jerry’s culture is based around lineage and remembering where you came from. When he knows he is dying, the urgent task he gives to Davidge is to memorise Jerry’s family, back over 500 generations, so that their child can know their history and be accepted by the Dracs. 

Rather than the action packed rescue that precedes it, the film’s final catharsis is based on recalling this lineage, on Davidge supporting his adopted son to reintegrate with his people by reciting Jerry’s family line.

Not only has Davidge upheld his pledge to his friend, but he has found a greater sense of purpose and growth.

Related

Enemy Mine

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you enjoy something I wrote, and want to support my writing, here’s a link for tips!