Can You Dig It? Well, Not Quite

As a child in South-Central Los Angeles in the ‘70s, John Singleton says he thought the original “Shaft” was “the coolest film I’d ever seen.” A lot of other people thought so, too, which is why Gordon Parks’ 1971 detective movie spawned two sequels and a short-lived television series while ushering in a gritty new wave of black action movies.

With their tough-talking antiheroes and hip soundtracks, the black movies of the era epitomized cool. John Shaft was an inner-city Bogart, a boundary-crossing pragmatist and loner who seemed to know everyone but owed allegiance only to his own principles. At the same time, “Shaft” and the other so-called blaxploitation movies mirrored black America’s new social and political assertiveness.

“You got problems, baby?” Shaft’s barely present steady girl asks in the original movie.

“Yeah, I got a couple of them,” Shaft answers. “I was born black, and I was born poor.”

That isn’t exactly a political treatise, yet it shows the way the film casually acknowledged the issues and concerns of its intended audience at a time when most Hollywood movies pretended that audience didn’t exist.

The movies were African American male fantasies, sure enough. But though the fantasy included easy sex, cool threads and nearly indestructible heroes, the stories existed in a recognizably real world. The richly textured New York milieu of the original “Shaft,” captured in Parks’ lingering exterior shots, was, in fact, more realistic than any of the movie’s cutout characters. Those low-budget movies might seem campy today, but for black urban audiences of the time they delivered a shock of recognition.

African Americans whose previous paradigm of manhood had been the saintly Sidney Poitier found Shaft’s cockiness empowering. Poitier seethed with anger in many of his roles, but he nevertheless represented an integrationist ideal that by the early ‘70s already had begun to lose appeal. Unlike the new heroes of the ‘70s, he was the perfect black professional male; he’d worked and studied hard in order to earn the right to move in next door.

Richard Roundtree, on the other hand, didn’t want to be your neighbor, and he didn’t care to come to dinner--he only wanted your daughter (and then only because she threw herself at him). And when he was through he showed her the door.

Shaft’s coolness, in other words--his every act and utterance--was explicitly political. His cockiness carried weight.

Which brings us to the new movie.

Singleton says he wanted to make Shaft relevant to this generation, but he didn’t set out consciously to update the movie in any significant way.

“What was cool then is cool now,” he says.

Yet Samuel L. Jackson’s Shaft differs starkly from Roundtree’s character. Yes, he still talks trash, he still goes his own way and has a fondness for leather coats. He still knows his way around New York’s mean streets, and he has an eye for the ladies. But in many ways, Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan seems to be more the model for this movie than Roundtree’s Shaft.

“ ‘Dirty Harry,’ ‘Point Blank,’ ‘The French Connection’--those films were very much on my mind,” acknowledges Singleton, naming three iconic movies from the ‘70s that were marked by their violence and by obsessional heroes operating outside the rules if not outside the law.

Several Writers Worked on Script

Singleton wrote the original story and screenplay for this “Shaft” with writer Shane Salerno, one of the co-writers on “Armageddon.” Producer Scott Rudin then brought in novelist and screenwriter Richard Price to rewrite the script, after which Singleton says he had another go at it.

Conflicts that the director and star had with Rudin and Price over the script have been heavily publicized. Divided at least in part by race, the factions fought over the character’s conception. Jackson plays the nephew of the original Shaft, but Singleton and Jackson were determined that he share the cockiness of the original and that the dialogue and attitude be “culturally specific.”

Price, renowned for his street-smart dialogue in movies and books, is white.

“Shaft had to have that attitude,” Singleton says, trying to put into words what he was fighting to preserve. “The film lives or dies on attitude, on character.”

In Price’s script, for example, a barmaid asks Shaft to come home with her, and he tells her he’s too tired. In Singleton’s spiced-up version, he asks her if she just wants to be held or if she wants “the L.D.,” meaning sex.

“I want the L.D.,” she says. “Then I want to be held.”

“Well, you know me,” Shaft replies, staying true to the original conception of the character as a “sex machine.” “It’s my duty to please that booty.”

Clearly pleased, Singleton chuckles as he recites the lines. “Some of the best lines in the movie are mine,” he says.

The movie brims with this kind of attitude and smart-alecky lines, but it’s hard to say what it all adds up to, in terms of character. The racial politics that were so much a part of the original film are murky here, and therefore so is the character.

A System That Is Manipulated by Money

Like “Dirty Harry,” Shaft is fed up with a legal system that lets criminals get away. The “Dirty Harry” movies were reactionary vigilante scenarios; in “Shaft” it isn’t red tape and liberalism that rankles the hero but racism and a criminal justice system that can be manipulated by money and influence.

This might sound like the reverse image of Eastwood’s avenging hero, but nothing is clear-cut. Whether liberal or conservative, he still is a brutal avenger. And what are we to make of a gun-wielding hero, a recently resigned New York cop at that, who shouts, “It’s Guiliani time,” while blowing away Latino bad guys?

Mention racial politics to Singleton in connection to the new movie and he responds, “What racial politics?” This clearly wasn’t one of his concerns.

After making a string of movies (including his first film, the influential “Boyz N the Hood,” and his last movie, “Rosewood”) that all were marked by keen attention to social context as well as an awareness of the consciousness-raising potential of film art, the director says that this time out he only wanted to have fun.

“My goal with this film was basically to get that whole ‘controversial filmmaker’ monkey off my back and really make a commercial film, a so-called commercial film that everybody could go to and enjoy,” he says.

“I never planned to be a controversial filmmaker,” he continues, speaking of how he has been perceived since the start of his career. That label was attached to him, he says, because of the kind of subject matter he found himself drawn to.

“I’m not like everybody else in the business, and I make different kinds of films. Because they’re different, people think they’re controversial. I’m not controversial at all.”

But if Singleton wanted to make a movie devoid of controversy and racial politics, one might question the wisdom of setting a film in New York City in the year 2000 in which the hero is a brutal cop. Just as the times imbued the ‘70s blaxploitation films with added social significance, different times now affect our reading of the new “Shaft.”

Whether by design or too many cooks in the kitchen, some seemingly political elements of the movie have been neutered by the way they’re handled. The film sets itself up to deal with inequalities of the legal process and with issues of corruption, but then it never gets around to addressing them--everything gets settled, to the extent that they are ever settled, with guns.

Also, the police department is portrayed as rife with racial animosity--blacks slur whites, whites slur blacks, Shaft’s commander seems to be out to get him. But in a pinch, the good black and white cops pull together--their racial problems forgotten. On the mean streets blue is the only color that counts.

At one point, Shaft talks with his uncle about his internal conflict, the one that presumedly leads him to walk away from the force: “I’m too black for the uniform and too blue for the brothers.” But from the way he takes to knocking heads and his “Guiliani time” battle cry (one searches in vain for a trace of irony in the utterance), it appears that in the heat of battle his conflicts get resolved. He’s true blue, after all.

And what are the racial politics of that?