Shaft

Gordon Parks / US, 1971 / 110 min.

The Civil Rights Acts had only been passed seven years earlier when Richard Roundtree, in the guise of private detective John Shaft, rose to become one of the first black film heroes. Shaft was the personification of the Blaxploitation genre: he was cool, charismatic and funky and he knew how to make his way through New York’s urban jungle. Most of the film’s profits incidentally ended up in the pockets of MGM, where an all-white board of producers went all the way to exploit ‘black awareness’.