Early May, Late December

Film: Harold and Maude
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

May-December romances in film generally go in one direction. We’ve had enough younger woman-older man combinations thrown at us that we don’t flinch that much when we see them. Seeing Sean Connery romancing a woman half his age is par for the course. They don’t go the other way that often, and when they do, they tend to be comedic. When it happens in the real world, we look at the young woman/old man pairing as an example in gold digging. Going the other way, the typical thought is psychosis…in the man.

Harold and Maude plays with the May-December romance angle in an extreme and unusual way. This is one of those strange films that plays with the idea of a very young man falling in love with a much, much older woman. It is, naturally, a comedy. But the comedy it offers is a richly hued black.

We’re introduced to Harold (Bud Cort) first. We watch him calmly walk through a richly-appointed room and, after a few minutes, we watch him hang himself. His mother (Vivian Pickles), a wealthy and emotionally distant and controlling woman, enters the room shortly afterwards and makes a phone call, sees Harold swinging, and continues her conversation. Several things soon become evident. First, Harold isn’t really dead. Second, his mother has seen this all before. Following a dinner party, Harold tries again, this time by splashing stage blood around his mother’s bathroom and pretending to slash his wrists and neck. Her reaction to this is a little more severe, and Harold winds up in therapy. Shortly after this therapy session, he buys himself a hearse to drive around in, and this causes his mother to be set on the path of getting Harold some focus.

At first, this comes in the form of his Uncle Victor (Charles Tyner), a career military man who lost his right arm in the war. Uncle Victor claims to have been McArthur’s right-hand man, a nice piece of irony since Victor’s right hand is now missing. He has arranged a hidden string on his uniform to allow his empty sleeve to salute, though. But it’s evident to anyone who really looks that the baby-faced Harold isn’t cut out for the military, so his mother sets about trying to get him married. To do this, she uses a computer dating service, filling out the forms for her preferences rather than Harold’s.

And then Maude (Ruth Gordon) shows up. As it turns out, both Harold and Maude like going to funerals. Harold likes them because he’s obsessed with death. Maude likes them because they are part of the grand dance of life—endings and burials that, in her philosophy, become new beginnings as the people that were turn into something new. Maude is a movie character—she steals cars for fun and drives around in them, figuring that if she gets caught, well, she’s a few days away from turning 80 and no one will press charges. Maude is a free spirit, doing whatever she wants whenever she wants, and she takes an immediate liking to Harold. In fact, at their third funeral together, she steals Harold’s hearse and offers him a ride in it.

In truth, Harold and Maude is not that different from a lot of films in its basic story. We have a stuffy, overly uptight guy who lives in an incredibly repressive environment who meets a woman who is free from all earthly concerns who teaches him to lighten up and not take everything in his life so seriously. It’s a film everyone has seen at least once. There are several important factors that make this film different from the rest, though.

First, Harold and Maude has a wicked sense of humor. Harold’s practical jokes and fake suicides are highlights of the film, many of them playing into the scene of the moment. As his mother fills in the computer dating form, she reads aloud, “Do you sometimes feel that life isn’t worth living?” as one of the questions to answer. While she fills in the neutral response, Harold is loading a pistol, which he will eventually use to “shoot” himself. He scares off a couple of his blind dates with faked suicides and accidents as well, almost as tests to see how they’ll react to what he’s doing.

Second, and importantly, most films don’t have Bud Cort. Cort is an example of perfect casting for this film. In addition to having the mannerisms of demeanor of a repressed guy on his way to full blown neuroses, he has the face of a child and the eyes and soul of an old man. There is a depth of sadness in Harold, an ocean of frustration, and these qualities flow out of Cort’s eyes through the entire film.

Third, most films don’t feature a soundtrack by Cat Stevens. It’s a damn good soundtrack.

Harold and Maude is funny and silly, and like anything that is filled with life, it’s also filled with pain, tragedy, and sadness. Because of this, it’s a wonderful movie. It’s a bit predictable, and Maude is perhaps too much the untamed flirt in an old woman’s body, but there’s a joy here that’s difficult to ignore. And it works, because the joy is touched with enough reality to ground it, and to remind us that joy is temporary because life is temporary, too.

Why to watch Harold and Maude: It’s funny as all hell.
Why not to watch: Septuagenarian bedroom antics.

White Tie and Tails

Film: Top Hat
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

In my family, there are two schools of thought when it comes to dance on film. One school of thought is that Gene Kelly was the greatest dancer to ever put on a pair of tap shoes (my position). The other is that no one was ever better than Fred Astaire (the position of my wife and kids). In truth, the two men are almost not comparable since their styles were so different. Fred Astaire was all refinement and elegance, class on two legs. Gene Kelly was pure athleticism and muscle. An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain are the finest examples of Kelly’s style. For Astaire, one need look no further than Top Hat, one of the finest examples of Astaire and Rogers ever created. And while I prefer Kelly’s more masculine, muscle-y style, There’s no getting around the fact that no one tapped like Fred Astaire.

Top Hat is a comedy of love and mistaken identity, a Shakespearean tale with a soundtrack. Jerry Travers (Astaire) is an American dancer in London to star in a new show produced by Horace Hardwick (Edward Everett Horton, best known in my generation as the narrator of Fractured Fairy Tales on the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show). Hardwick’s wife Madge (Helen Broderick) is in Italy, expecting Horace and Jerry to come visit. It seems that she has a little matchmaking plan to hook up Jerry and a young friend named Dale Tremont (Ginger Rogers).

Unfortunately for Madge’s plans, Jerry and Dale have already met. During a particularly active bit of dancing in Horace’s apartment, Jerry manages to wake Dale up, since she lives in the room below. Jerry is immediately smitten with Dale and pursues her around London, much to her chagrin. The biggest part of this chagrin comes from the fact that Dale is already being aggressively pursued by Alberto Beddini (Erik Rhodes), a clothing designer. Through a crazy bit of chance, Dale becomes convinced that Jerry is actually Horace, and is thus repulsed that the husband of her friend is pursuing her romantically. And much dancing, singing and hilarity ensues.

Really, Top Hat is very much typical of early musicals. The plot is simple and follows a formula that only bad modern movies do—the plot could be easily resolved halfway through if one person let Dale know that Jerry and Horace are different people. That’s it. But, while this plot drives me mad in current movies, it’s only fair to give a little more license for a film made in 1935. And really, the plot isn’t the focus here. No one goes into this film (or really many of the other Astaire/Rogers films) because of the scintillating plot. It’s really all about the dancing.

And boy damn howdy! The dancing is dandy fine! No, really—it’s some of the best dancing committed to film. It would be great to see some of this in color to add to the spectacle, because there’s a hell of a lot of spectacle in black-and-white. The big finale is The Piccolino at the end of the film, but the ones everyone remembers are “Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails” and “Cheek to Cheek.”

Another sell point of the film is the script, which is pretty tasty. There are a number of solid one-liners throughout the film. Beddini is essentially a comic character with his incomplete mastery of English, but it is Horace’s manservant Bates (Eric Blore) who gets a lot of the good lines and comic moments. He’s a step south of Jeeves, and almost as funny as anything Wodehouse ever wrote, and that’s saying something.

At the end of the day, Top Hat is a pleasant little nothing of a film that exists more or less as a showcase for what Fred Astaire could do in a pair of tap shoes and what Ginger Rogers could do with him. And you know what? That’s really more than enough. The plot is just involved enough to remain interesting and a reason to watch the film, and the dancing is just so damn good that nothing more is needed. It’s cute and sweet, and more than anything, it’s one of the reasons Fred Astaire is still considered one of the greatest dancers in film history.

Oh, and a little bit of trivia--that's Lucille Ball as the assistant in the flower shop.

Why to watch Top Hat: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers need to be seen to be believed.
Why not to watch: It’s kind of dippy in the modern world.

Broken Arrow

Film: Dead Man
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

I imagine that one of the great perks of being a respected artsy director is that you can get great people for itty bitty roles. Take, for example, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. Much of the cast beyond its main stars reads like an entry off a Who’s Who page. Robert Mitchum, John Hurt, Gabriel Byrne, Alfred Molina, Billy Bob Thornton, even weird ol’ Crispin Glover…most of whom have about five minutes of screen time. There’s got to be a real sense of satisfaction knowing that you can fill a small but critical role with essentially anyone you want for the part.

Dead Man has been dubbed an “acid Western,” combining the extravagance of the traditional spaghetti Western, the symbolism of classics, and the sensibilities of the counter-culture. I don’t know much about that, but I do know that it’s something to behold. It’s as divergent from the standard horse and six-gun picture as anything I’ve seen in the last year. In fact, had you asked me as recently as a week ago what Western I would call my favorite, I would have likely named films like Unforgiven and The Searchers. They’re still in the mix, certainly, but now, so is Dead Man.

Let’s take care of the plot quickly so that we can get to the fun stuff. A bespectacled accountant named William Blake (Johnny Depp) spends his life savings to travel from Cleveland to the town of Machine where he has been promised a job in the factory owned by a man named Dickinson (Robert Mitchum). However, once he gets to Machine, he discovers that the job has been filled, and Dickinson threatens him with a shotgun. Blake leaves and is taken in by Thel (Mili Avital), a former prostitute. Sadly, the arrival of Thel’s former lover Charlie (Gabriel Byrne) results in the deaths of both Charlie and Thel. Blake runs, not knowing that Charlie was the son of Dickinson, who has the money to cause Blake some real trouble.

In the exchange of gunfire with Charlie, Blake is injured, and now has a bullet lodged near his heart. He is discovered by a native named Nobody (Gary Farmer), who believes that Blake is the reincarnation of the poet William Blake. It is Nobody’s belief that this current Blake will create a different kind of poetry—one made of the blood of white men. This will be important, because Dickinson has put out a large bounty on Blake’s head and has sent three rabid killers after him. Of these, Johnny “The Kid” Pickett (Eugene Byrd) is the youngest and angriest, Conway Twill (Michael Wincott) is the most talkative, and Cole Wilson (Lance Henriksen) is the most terrifying. In fact, only Wilson will make the full journey. A known cannibal, he kills the others, and eats one of them.

What we get here is a very simple story told in a complex narrative. A man runs from a crime he committed out of self preservation and is forced to adapt to his new world and reality in order to survive as best he can, knowing that the wound he has sustained will kill him eventually. It is, therefore, not a quest for survival, but a quest for purpose and meaning before the inevitable end of his life.

And there are plenty of treasures on the way there. John Hurt appears for a few minutes as the assistant to the violent Dickinson. Alfred Molina appears at the end of the film as a racist trader. Iggy Pop and Billy Bob Thornton show up in between as two thirds of a group of insane trappers bent on doing something really not good to poor William Blake. Thornton is recognizable only from his voice, and Iggy Pop is certainly easy to spot despite the fact that he wears a dress and a bonnet. But the cameos do work because they are smart, and because they don’t really detract from anything on the screen. And, fortunately, the film really rests in the hands of Depp, Henriksen, and especially Gary Farmer, who is without question the best thing in the film—and for a film this good, that’s high praise.

What strikes me about this film as opposed to most other Westerns is the care with which the Native American question is addressed. In the early days of film, Native Americans were little more than savages frequently depicted as subhuman. As we moved into the more politically correct, enlightened, and white guilt-laden 90s, Native Americans became the complete opposite. They became magical beings of intense and deep wisdom, a noble race of people who lived in peace and harmony with the world until the balance was tipped by the marauding Europeans.

Dead Man does neither of these two things. It instead attempts to portray Nobody as a real person—neither a ridiculous savage nor an all-knowing font of spiritual and universal wisdom. Nobody’s past is filled with racism; he was captured and caged by English trappers, but was also pushed out of tribal society since his parents were from opposing tribes. While certainly knowledgeable and educated, Nobody’s wisdom is the wisdom of his own people and does not touch on the reality (really) of Blake’s world. In short, he’s a real person in a real world. He has a set of skills and a world of things that he does not understand.

All of this is greatly assisted by two tremendous artistic choices. First, Jarmusch shot the film in a rich, vibrant black and white, giving the film an older visual feel. The film truly loses nothing by not being in color, and gains a level of natural credibility for a Western. Second, the film was scored by Neil Young, who manages (as he frequently does) to blend both the modern, electronic age with the feel of the past and the prairie. Young’s music often evokes the feeling of anachronism, of ancient words and ideas in a modern context. Dead Man does the reverse, putting a modern story of spiritual survival and vision into the framework of the past. These two things juxtapose brilliantly.

Suffice to say that Dead Man now ranks as one of my favorite Westerns. This is a film I will watch again, and will likely enjoy more the next time through.

Why to watch Dead Man: A modern spiritual quest in old trappings.
Why not to watch: Cameo roles often leave me wanting more, with the exception of Crispin Glover.

Doomed Idyll

Film: Il Giardino dei Finzi Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis)
Format: DVD from Bettendorf Public Library through interlibrary loan on kick-ass portable DVD player.

The most filmed historical event may well be the Holocaust. I have no proof of this, but based on the number of Holocaust films or Holocaust-related films I have seen in the last 20 months alone, it’s a topic that filmmakers like to visit and revisit. It certainly makes sense. There’s inherent drama at the highest and most intense level, tremendous potential for pathos, and even a guaranteed sense of sympathy from the audience. Unless you are an emotional stone…or a skinhead…you can’t help but feel for the people for whom the world has become a terrible place.

And so we get Vittorio De Sica’s entry into the field of oppressed Judaism in the form of Il Giardino dei Finzi Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis). What’s interesting here is that De Sica doesn’t come at this from the normal point of view and does not present us with a typical story. Instead, we get (naturally) the Finzi-Contini family, who have more money and idle time than they know what to do with. But, the Finzi-Continis are Jewish, which means the Final Solution will touch them eventually, and will touch them hard.

We start with rounds of tennis hosted by Alberto (Helmut Berger) and Micol (Dominique Sanda), the Finzi-Contini children, who are hosting this tennis party in their expansive, eponymous garden. The reason for this is that they have essentially been banned from the Ferrara tennis club because they are Jewish, and thus the tennis party must be at their estate. Also present is Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio), a childhood friend from a middle-class Jewish family. It’s evident that Giorgio is madly in love with Micol, and equally obvious that this love is not particularly returned, or not returned in the same way.

What’s interesting here is that there are several stories going on at the same time, but all essentially express the same type of tension. The love story, or rather the lack-of love story between Giorgio and Micol often takes center stage here. Micol is frequently seductive around Giorgio, but constantly pushes him away, in no small part because she claims to view him more as a brother than as a potential lover.

At the same time, we see a similar tension between the aristocratic Finzi-Continis and the middle-class Jewish families, particularly Giorgio’s. Giorgio’s father (Romolo Valli) is particularly suspicious of the Finzi-Continis, wishing his son would not spend so much time with them. They are, for lack of a better way to put it, not in the same social class, a fact that is of great concern to the man. And yet just as Giorgio is helplessly pulled toward Micol, he is also pulled toward the social standing that the Finzi-Continis represent.

There is a real parallel here with the aristocracy’s relationship to the growing tide of fascism, both in Italy and in Europe at large at this point. Early in the film, Micol comments that everyone will soon have to learn German, and she sometimes peppers her speech with German words. Giorgio’s father in particular is given to the idea of appeasement, submitting to each new anti-Semitic decree with a resigned shrug and the rationalization that at least things haven’t gotten so bad that he can’t leave his house. He recognizes that he is a third-class citizen in the new regime of Il Duce, but that at least he is still a citizen.

And then there is Alberto, who early in the film stops leaving the estate, preferring to live his life entirely behind the large walls that separate the family estate from the outside world. In essence, he blocks himself off from the reality of what the world is and what it is becoming, remaining in an idyllic world of tennis and friends and the family garden rather than truly exposing himself to the mounting terror outside the walls. This tendency to keep himself both safe and willfully deluded is assisted greatly by the fact that Alberto is sickly, and is frequently too ill to even get out of bed.

It’s the unrequited love story that is in many ways the most interesting here, because it seems to serve as a metaphor for everything else going on. At one point, still obsessed with Micol, Giorgio sees her post-coital with Bruno Malnate (Fabio Testi), a gentile friend who she previously disregarded as too crude and too much the socialist for her. But even with his socialist tendencies, Malnate is far closer to the Aryan ideal, and poor Giorgio is forced to watch this stand-in for fascism essentially mating with the flower of Italian Jewish aristocracy. While it doesn’t go so far as to say that the Jewish aristocracy was complicit with the fascists (although one character does say it about the Finzi-Continis at one point), it certainly points in that direction.

This is a fascinating film. It lacks the power of De Sica’s earlier Ladri di Biciclette, but it is far more expertly filmed. And it ends at the right time. We are forced to confront what we know will happen without being forced to see it. What we assume is always worse and more tragic than what we are shown, and it was a good choice here.

Why to watch Il Giardino dei Finzi Contini: It’s both idyllic and terrible.
Why not to watch: How many Holocaust stories do you need?

Sociopath de L'amour

Film: Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I don’t think I’m a prude. I don’t object to sex, or to expressions of sex, or even to honest conversation about sex. But I didn’t expect what I got with Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim). What I expected was the summary on the NetFlix envelope: “Writers Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) are close friends who fall in love with the same woman, the unpredictable Catherine (Jeanne Moreau)…What results is a decades-long love triangle that both tests and strengthens the bond between the two men.” Sounds interesting, no? Yeah, it’s not that at all.

What Jules et Jim is instead is a film about capriciousness, jealousy, infidelity, dependency, and selfishness. To a one, these are character traits that I don’t hold in a lot of esteem. There’s love, and then there’s this film, in which love appears like someone looking in through a window. It’s sort of there, but not really a part of the gathering. Love is an onlooker here, not a member of the cast.

So, while the Austrian Jules and the French Jim have their names emblazoned in the title, it is Catherine who truly takes center stage in this strange little drama. Our two writers meet and become close friends, bonding over art, writing, poetry, and eventually, over a particular statue that bears an enigmatic smile. Later, they meet Catherine, who has the same smile. It is Jules who she attaches herself to first. They leave for Austria, and almost immediately, World War I begins.

Jules and Jim survive the war, and eventually Jim goes to visit his friends. What he finds is their child, Sabine (Sabine Haudepin) and a marriage that is on the rocks. Catherine has not been faithful and has never been faithful. In fact, she was unfaithful to Jules the night before the wedding because of some slight uttered by Jules’s mother. And there were others, of course. We are given to believe that there have been many others. Jules, of course, has been faithful because Catherine demands it—in her philosophy, one person in a relationship must be faithful, and it certainly isn’t going to be her.

Jules eventually figures out that Catherine is looking for a reason to leave him. He confesses that she has in the past—she walked out for six months before returning. Why? She wanted to. Or something. Eventually, Jules convinces Jim to marry Catherine just so he can stay close to her. Jim does, and then they have to wait for awhile before sexing it up because Catherine wants a child with Jim, and wouldn’t know if the child was his if she became pregnant right away. And naturally, when they don’t instantly conceive a child, Catherine decides that she is tired of Jim and hates him and wants him to go away and never come back. Until she discovers she is pregnant and loves him more than anything. Until she loses the child and decides she hates him again.

Essentially, this film is supposed to be about the tremendous bond of friendship between Jules and Jim that endures and grows stronger despite the war between their countries and (really) despite them both falling madly in love with Catherine. And my reaction is to wonder why anyone would put up with the antics of Catherine, because they aren’t lighthearted, whimsical moments that anyone would find endearing, but fickle, erratic actions of someone who cares only about herself and damn the cost. Catherine is abusive and thinks only of herself constantly with no regard to how anyone else feels at any time. She turns her love for someone on and off like a faucet. In fact, she may be a borderline sociopath, and "may" and "borderline" might not apply.

So with Catherine sufficiently analyzed (or at least to my own satisfaction), let’s take a look at our two titular characters. These two, especially Jules, are men who seriously need to grow a pair. Jules even comments that Catherine is not particularly “…beautiful, intelligent, or sincere, but she’s a real woman.” And? That’s worth your own personal misery? But they are completely unable to break away from Catherine. Jim tries; he returns from Paris at one point when he is planning to marry Catherine only to discover that she has disappeared because she didn’t like his last letter. So Jim prepares to return to Paris and be done with things when she shows back up. So he stays.

This says nothing of the fact that Catherine vanished so she could have revenge sex with a guy named Albert (Boris Bassiak). And this doesn’t touch on the fact that Jim was in Paris sleeping with an ex-girlfriend named Gilberte (Vanna Urbino) who is still waiting for him to get over this whole Catherine thing. And this says nothing of the ultimate ending to the film (which I will not spoil) in which Catherine pulls one of the greatest dick moves in film history, and which we are supposed to accept as essentially the natural culmination of her “charming” ways.

Suffice to say that while this film is considered a nouvelle vague masterpiece, I didn’t think much of it. Catherine was not the enchantress I was led to believe she would be, but was a vain, vindictive, selfish person with severe emotional and mental issues. Eventually, even if the sex comes gold-plated, there’s a time to move on, but Jules and Jim never get there. What a couple of clods.

Why to watch Jules et Jim: Truffaut is too good to make something not worth watching.
Why not to watch: Sociopathy is not a positive character trait.

Month 20 Status Report...and Bonus News!

So another month comes to an end, or near enough that I can put up this post. I didn't do much this month in terms of longer films, but I certainly hit the rarities and hard-to-find films pretty hard, which is a good thing. I also had a bit of an uptick in the total number of films watched this month compared with the two previous. All good. Heading into the last third of the year, I need to stay at about 23 per month to end the year at the (soon to be updated) halfway point, which puts me close to on pace to finish by the end of 2013. However, I'll soon be watching more and more films that don't appear on The List at all because of the news below.

So here's the news: you can now officially find me as the co-host of The Demented Podcast every other week along with Demented Podcast originator Nick Jobe. We've only done one cast so far, and our first podcast with a guest is a couple of days away (and about 10 from broadcast), but so far the fit feels pretty good, and we have a good crop of guests lined up for the coming weeks and months. So listen in!

I hope to have more news soon about something else entirely.

Oh, and if you have the time check out this latest article of mine. They spelled my name wrong (of course), but I'm happy for the publication credit.

He's a Complicated Man

Film: Shaft
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Who’s the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks? Who is the man who would risk his neck for his brother man? Who’s the cat that won’t cop out when there’s danger all about? You should know that I’m talk about Shaft. Can you dig it? Shaft is a complicated man, and no one understands him but his woman.

Okay, enough fun with the theme song here. Shaft is not the first blaxploitation film, nor the first really important one (that would be Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song), but it is the first one to be a huge financial success. It’s also the film that set a number of the blaxploitation clichés and stereotypes into some pretty heavy stone. In its own way, Shaft is the granddaddy of the subgenre, the one that dozens of films in the 1970s wanted to be. More than that, the character of John Shaft was (and still is in many ways) the prototype of the blaxploitation hero.

While the plot won’t be much of a shock if you haven’t seen Shaft, but it’s important to remember that in many ways this film is the progenitor of the films that followed. With this film, the plot was something relatively new, or at least a new spin on an old plot. We have the eponymous John Shaft (Richard Roundtree), who is a private detective with some connections with the police, particularly Vic Androzzi (Charles Cioffi). Shaft is being sought after by a high-profile criminal named Bumpy Jones (the vastly underrated Moses Gunn).

As it turns out, Bumpy isn’t looking for Shaft to get rid of him, but to hire him. It seems that someone has kidnapped Bumpy’s daughter Marcy (Sherri Brewer) and naturally Bumpy wants her back. Bumpy claims not to know who has his daughter, but he suspects a gang of men with connection to the Black Panthers, particularly Ben Buford (Christopher St. John). He hands Shaft an envelope full of cash and tells him to find his girl.

As it turns out, things are not this simple. When Shaft finds Ben, they are attacked by men with sub-machine guns. Shaft and Ben escape, and Shaft gets a little more information from Androzzi. It seems that the Mafia has moved arrived in town. Bumpy Jones has taken over the drug trade in Harlem, and the Mob wants it back, and back by any means possible up to and including kidnapping Bumpy’s daughter and holding her for ransom. Naturally, this means that there’s going to be a war on the streets of New York unless Shaft can stop things, and thus we have a third act.

So with the basic plot squared away, let’s talk about what’s important here. First, the name “John Shaft” is one of the great film character names in history, and ranks with “James Bond” as the greatest action character name ever. Seriously—you can say it easily, shout it, say it seductively, and even insert the word “muthafuckin’” into it easily (as in “John muthafuckin’ Shaft”). This doesn’t even touch on the fact that “shaft” is a slang term for male genitalia or the fact that, as a black private detective, he’s always getting shafted by the man. It’s name that works on every level, and there’s not a thing that can be changed to make it better. It’s flawless, and it’s not a stretch to say that it’s one of the reasons for the film’s success.

Additionally, while I still say that Super Fly has the greatest soundtrack in film history, the title track for Shaft may well be the best song ever written for a movie. It’s iconic for a reason, and it’s even iconic without the butter-smooth voice of Isaac Hayes asking questions about the man who is John Shaft.

But these things are superficial. There’s something much more important going on here. Where a lot of the blaxploitation films fell short is in how the film carried through its plot. In a sense, the dialogue of the film predicts this. For me, the most important moment in the film is the second meeting in Androzzi’s office, when Shaft and Androzzi finally come clean with each other. Androzzi comments that the coming war between the Mob and Bumpy Jones is going to be a huge problem. He says, essentially, that the war will be gang against gang, but that on the surface it will be black against white.

And that’s sort of the point here. It’s not black against white, which is what the blaxploitation genre turned into following this film. It’s not black working with white, either—when he’s accused of being an Uncle Tom, Shaft reacts badly, and no one who sees the film would ever consider Shaft has that particular failing. The central point is that the problem going on in New York that Shaft finds himself embroiled in is bigger than race, or at least different from race. It’s a critical point, and one easily overlooked.

Suffice it to say that this film is another one that made me feel pretty white, but not nearly so much as films like Super Fly and Boyz N the Hood. If I have a problem with the film, it’s that it feels a bit dated because of the language being used. But, change the jive a little, and this is a film that very much plays today—kind of remarkable for something nearly as old as I am.

As a final note, it’s worth saying that one of the most successful things about this film is that we as an audience learn everything we need to know about John Shaft before the opening credits have rolled. We see Shaft walking across a busy New York street, and he stops for nothing. No onrushing cab will cause him to deviate from his path. There’s no better ten seconds or so that show us exactly who this man is, and the rest of the film backs up that opening perfectly.

Why to watch Shaft: Because that cat is one baaaaad mutha…Shut yo mouth!.
Why not to watch: It can’t shake the fact that it feels dated.