I gotta admit it.  I didn’t like John Singleton’s sequel to the original Shaft.  Despite receiving the blessings from Gordon Parks, the director of the 1971 original, and Richard Roundtree himself, the whole affair seemed a little wrongheaded.  Shaft, the character, was a man of a certain era, and he needed those trappings to fully inform the character.  He needed the 1970s.  Classic detectives like Phillip Marlowe or The Thin Man wouldn’t quite work if you dropped them into the early 21st century, and neither does Shaft.

Also, Singleton cast Samuel L. Jackson in the title role.  Simply put, besides being tough, Shaft is a sexy dude.  Isaac Hayes’ classic theme drips with sex.  It’s a soulful elegy to Shaft’s sexual prowess.  Hell, his name is “Shaft,” and that’s so obvious it would make Freud blush.  Despite Samuel L. Jackson’s badass credentials, sexy he ain’t.  Sorry, Sam, but it’s true.  You may be a bad motherfucker, but nobody believes you’ve got the sex appeal to get-down-and-dirty and actually…well, you know.

Now if I were remaking Shaft, I would set it firmly in 1971 and use Ernest Tidyman’s 1971 novel as the template for casting.  Following, I’ll provide a selection of text from Tidyman’s first Shaft novel to describe a major character, show the original actor cast and then provide my choice for the role for a re-make:

JOHN SHAFT – Black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks.

Page 83: “Shaft’s face was…more round than oval, more flat and concave than sculptured and convex.  The eyes and nose seemed to have been cut into it, rather than built into it.  It was almost a Polynesian carved face, cut into stained balsa or some dark wood.  The lips were full, but they lay flat against his teeth.  A mask, but not a mask…Life and strength.  It was framed in a modified Afro haircut, notched with unexpectedly delicate and tightly set ears.”

Original: Richard Roundtree.  I can’t imagine the original, or the sequels, without him.

My Selection:  The Wire’s Idris Elba.

BUMPY JONAS – ( “Knocks Persons” in the novels) - undisputed gangster kingpin of Harlem

Pages 33-34: “Knocks Persons just sat there.  Massive, mountainous, a great brown mound of a man in a black suit completely filling the white leather chair that looked like a vertical bathtub on a chrome base with casters…shaven head gleaming in the soft indirect light, folds of flesh around his bull neck almost hiding the collar of his shirt.  A lumbering giant whose police records described him as a fraction over 6 feet 6 inches tall, weighing 290 pounds with distinct scars in at least eleven places on his massive body.”

Original: Moses Gunn, a strong actor with a great, slow-burning menacing presence, but not exactly “massive.”

My Selection: Who else but Michael Clarke-Duncan of The Green Mile fame?

BEN BUFORD – Black firebrand and revolutionary; an old pal of Shaft’s from back in the day

Page 56: “…Watusi-tall and warrior-fierce in his stance.  So tall and lean with a great bush of tight black curls surrounding his slender ascetic face.  His arms and legs so slim and long that even the suits he affected were not quite enough to cloak the angularity of the body.  He did not look at all like his voice.  A warrior or an inflamed divinity student with gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose.

Original: Christopher St. John (St. John was actually Tidyman’s preferred choice for the role of John Shaft)

My Selection: This one was kind of difficult, but I would have to go with the Isaiah Washington, formerly of Grey’s Anatomy.  Haughty, and brash, as evidenced by his inexcusable outburst toward his co-star, T.R. Knight, but a skilled and dynamic actor whose bearing fits Buford’s description.

LIEUTENANT VICTOR ANDEROZZI – Shaft’s contact with the New York Police Department.

Page 13: “The lieutenant had a thin, gray face and black hooded eyes.  He was as tall as Shaft, just under six feet, but much leaner, and the way he stood made Shaft think of sharp objects.  The lieutenant looked like a linoleum knife, ready to cut.  The big beak of a nose made it complete.”

The Original: Charles Cioffi.  Good actor, and he had great chemistry with Roundtree, but he doesn’t make one think of “sharp objects,” does he?

My Selection: Adrien Brody (The Pianist, Summer of Sam).  He may be a little young, but that nose, man!  That nose!

HELEN GREEN - (”Dina Green” in the movie) - the wife of Shaft’s accountant, Marvin Green; possibly Shaft’s only platonic female friend.

Shaft and Ben Buford use the Green’s apartment as a temporary safehouse after escaping an attempted hit on Buford.  (I don’t think we ever see Marvin Green in any of the Shaft novels or movies, but Helen is present in at least two of the books.)

Page 87:  “She was the least black negro he knew, possibly the most attractive, possibly the most feminine and womanly as well.  Marvin Green was a fortunate man to have her as a wife and the mother of his children.”

Page 89: “…a Negro girl two or three generations removed from the blackness of skin and soul that had brought Shaft to her kitchen in flight…”

Original: Camille Yarbrough.  She didn’t take any guff off Ben Buford, chastising him for his language.  Even Shaft deferred to her.

My Selection: At first, I was thinking Taraji P. Henson (I was just looking for an excuse to post her picture), but as I looked further into the book for a good description, I found that Ernest Tidyman also described Helen Green as having “hazel eyes.”  Therefore, it became evident that Eva Marcille would make a better choice.

Those are my choices.  Now it’s your turn.  Who would you pick?

- JEP

Show of hands:  How many of you knew that “Shaft” started as a literary character before he moved to the silver screen?  In response to one of my tweets, a supremely literate and knowledgeable friend of mine recently told me he had no idea and suggested that it would be a good topic for a blog post.  I completely agreed.  With this post, I just wanted to give an overview of the literary version of the character, but in subsequent posts, I will review the novels themselves.

Shaft was the literary creation of Ernest Tidyman, who also co-wrote the screenplay for original film and among other works, he also co-wrote the screenplay for another iconic 1970s film, The French Connection.  Ernest Tidyman was one of the few White individuals to ever receive an NAACP Image Award, due to his iconic character.  The literary version of Shaft, hereafter referred to as “Literary Shaft,” is a lot like the character Richard Roundtree portrayed in the films (”Movie Shaft”).  Both are cool, confident, tough brothers from the streets of New York, with a taste for the finer things in life.  In all, there were six Shaft novels: Shaft (1971), Shaft’s Big Score (1972), Shaft Among The Jews (1973), Shaft Has A Ball(1973) , Goodbye, Mr. Shaft (1974), and Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers (1975). (There was a seventh novel, entitled The Last Shaft (1975), that allegedly ended with Shaft’s death, but I believe it only had limited distribution in the United Kingdom.)

The novels use an omnicient narrator, and due to the inherent nature of prose, we get into Shaft’s head a lot more than in the movies.  For instance, in the novel Shaft, published in 1971, we learn exactly where Shaft was coming from before the film’s iconic opening shot of him emerging from the subway station.  He wasn’t just heading to work, he was replaying his wonderful, romantic escapades of the previous evening, which only ended shortly before we catch up with him on the street.  Also, in the course of his investigations, Shaft freely riffs on everything from hot dogs, to the weather, to his insecurities about getting older.  When the reader is first introduced to John Shaft in the first book of the series, he is 28 years old, but by the sixth novel, Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers (1975), despite although only five years have passed since the first novel, Shaft’s Afro is now peppered with grey hair.  The reader also learns about Shaft’s nearly fatal tour in the US Marine Corps and the mental and physical scars he still bears from his time as a common street hood.

Undoubtedly because of his past, Literary Shaft has a mean streak a mile wide.  The movie downplayed this aspect, most notably in the first action scene in Shaft’s office.  In the film, a scuffle between Shaft and two of Bumpy Johnson’s henchman results in one of them hurtling through the office window to his death after a mis-timed leap.  In the novel, after calmly making mental notes about his office mail, Shaft dispassionately grabs the skinniest hood by the lapels and tosses him through the window, merely to serve as an object lesson to the surviving crook.

One of the regrettable, features of Literary Shaft is his homophobia.  Movie Shaft enjoys a genial, familiar relationship with  Rollie The Bartender (played by Rex Robbins) from The Bar With No Name, which is located across the street from Shaft’s Greenwich Village apartment.  Whether it was through Gordon Parks’ direction or Robbins’ interpretation, in the film, it is strongly implied that Rollie is gay.  For example, in one blink-and-you-miss-it moment, Rollie gooses Shaft in the ass as he steps behind the bar.  Movie Shaft barely acknowledges the gesture, however Literary Shaft probably would have broken the guys fingers.  Literary Shaft drips disdain for gays, and it’s an ugly attitude that recurs with irksome regularity throughout the series, particularly in Shaft Has A Ball, in which Shaft investigates a scheme to pull off a heist during a drag queen ball.  At one point, Shaft feigns a come-on to a gay waiter to gain information, then encourages the man to meet him in a particularly sketchy area of Central Park later that evening.  Shaft does so with the explicit hope that the man will get beaten up when he arrives.

Tidyman also demonstrates a strange fixation on the idea of a Black revolution, and this fixation manifested itself in the character of Ben Buford.  In the first Shaft novel, and in the movie, Shaft needs an army to fight the Italian mob and recover the missing daughter of the Harlem gangster, Knocks Persons (known as “Bumpy Johnson” in the film).  Persons manipulates Shaft into recruiting Ben Buford and his group of Black nationalists to be that army.  Although the Buford/Persons interplay makes for interesting commentary on the state, and aspirations, of Black America at the time, Ben Buford somehow becomes a recurring bogeyman as the series progresses.  Whether it’s a gang disguised as drag queens or Shaft getting dragged into political intrigue on the island of Jamaica, Buford’s name, and the specter of revolution, always lurks in the background.

Despite some of the drawbacks above, which could be dismissed as products of their time, all the Shaft novels are remarkable examples of taut, hardboiled crime novels.  There’s nothing campy or satirical about them.  Tidyman’s Shaft admirably captured the attitude and mindset of a Black man carving out his own niche in a very violent world, and in that regard it remains a unique and welcome addition to the ranks of detective fiction, but in actuality, there’s very little space between a classic fictional detective like Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and Ernest Tidyman’s John Shaft.  The differences are only skin deep.

- JEP

Today is the 68th birthday of Richard Roundtree, best known for his portrayal of John Shaft in Shaft, Shaft’s Big Score, and Shaft In Africa.  What more can be said?  If you’re dropping by here, you know the score.  With the character of John Shaft, Roundtree set a new standard for Black leading men:  Smooth, dangerous, and not inclined to take shit off anyone. 

- JEP