Shaft (1971)
Directed by Gordon Parks
Cool Black private eye John Shaft is hired by a crime lord to find and retrieve his kidnapped daughter.
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What critics compared Shaft to
Omari Hardwick’s costuming recalls Shaft (1971) and Coffy (1973), a kind of literal pun on blaxploitation movie history and black exploitation in the workplace.
For years he has been the driver of �Bumpy� Johnson (played twice on film each by Moses Gunn in a pair of Shaft features and Laurence Fishburne in The Cotton Club and Hoodlum and now played briefly by Clarence Williams III) who mentored him like a son right up to the moment of his death espousing on the cultural change that�s happening in the late �60s.
Richard Roundtree (the original “Shaft”) pops up as a vice principal who pumps Brendan for the inside skinny on school goings-on, and the two trade weight back in forth in a very funny scene that nimbly upends the normal high school power structure.
Most notably, The Pin's mom (Reedy Gibbs) serves juice to her son's "friends," and the great Richard Roundtree (Shaft) co-stars as an assistant Vice Principal, the friendly, but not-so friendly, authority figure who attaches himself to Brendan's investigation.
In tracking her down, he enlists the services of the class geek genius, the Brain (Matt O'Leary), and warily joins forces with the contentious school principal (Richard Roundtree, far from his "Shaft" days).
A silly, amusing and occasionally rather funny spoof of "blaxploitation" films of the 1970s (such as "Shaft" and "Superfly") as mixed with James Bond, the picture will obviously draw inevitable comparisons to the Austin Powers character and movies.
June 4, 2002 -- "Undercover Brother" is an effective spoof of films of the 1970s like "Shaft," the James Bond films, kung-fu films and others.
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Films such as "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" and "Shaft" kicked off the genre in 1971.
The big-kid auteur gives shout-outs to everything from Gordon Parks’s “Shaft” to martial arts action star Sonny Sheba.
Parks is best known for “Shaft”, the 1971 “blaxploitation” classic.
But the heart of it all is in the decor and costumes, which owe a lot to the neon-toned palette of those ornaments of the '70s PI genre, Gordon Parks's Shaft movies, the in-period rock soundtrack and the repartee which defines the unlikely bromance between the movie's two flatfoots.
As for the action genre, its inheritance of aspects of film noir and the social problem film was evident in important early actions films such as Dirty Harry (1971) and Shaft (1971) and Walking Tall (1973) and the first Mad Max (1979), and sustained in many of the best films of the genre ( First Blood , Terminator, Predator, Aliens, RoboCop, Die Hard, Bourne Identity, District 9 ).
Shaft and Super Fly had kicked off the “blaxpoitation” movement in 1971 and 1972, respectively — but those films were geared primarily to a black audience (and they certainly found one).