Directed by Gordon Parks and starring Richard Roundtree as the itinerant black detective, John Shaft, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's hugely successful 1972 feature, helped initiate Hollywood's Blaxploitation film craze, a series of cheap and...

Shaft is a 1971 Academy Award winning film directed by Gordon Parks. An action film that has elements of film noir, it tells the story of a black private detective, John Shaft, who travels through Harlem and to the Italian mob in order to find the...

University Wire 06-15-2000 (Daily Texan) (U-WIRE) AUSTIN, Texas -- People often consider the original, 1971 version of Shaft the king of blaxploitation films. This isn't true. It was a crime drama that merely helped start the trend. Like John Carpenter's Halloween, Shaft helped create...

University Wire 06-23-2000 (The Pitt News) (U-WIRE) PITTSBURGH -- I just spent the weekend in New York, walking the streets, dodging the traffic and seeing the newest incarnation of "Hamlet" with Ethan Hawke and "Love's Labour's Lost" with Kenneth Branagh. After an overdose of...

It was obvious to Scott and Kelly Cornelisse that their 2-year-old chocolate Labrador retriever, Remington, wasn't feeling well. What they didn't know was that their dog, for as long as they had owned him, had been living with part of an arrow lodged in his...

There’s no question that the East Side will be getting shafted—it’s just a question of where and for how long. The Department of Environmental Protection, along with the Department of Design and Construction, is currently scoping out sites for the location of Shaft 33B, the...

[Shaft is] quite a lively article—a straight forward, one-to-one transformation of the elements of 'forties' thrillers into contemporary terms. It is in between the action and the constant crackle of hip jargon that there is room for dissatisfaction. Although Parks has revitalised the clichés more thoroughly than many similar attempts—to the extent of a black private eye, Harlem locations, and so on—and has avoided nostalgia for a recreated style, retaining only a f...

Shaft (first name John) is a black private detective who is a cross between Sam Spade and James Bond. He is the hero of a modishly photographed, but rather old-fashioned, private-eye melodrama directed by black former photo journalist and still photographer Gordon Parks. Despite a difficult-to-follow plot—about the grudge kidnapping of the daughter of a black racketeer by the Mafia—and an unabashed racial militance in tone (tempered however by good humor), the film is a disarmingly entertainin...