In 1971, Richard Roundtree made surely the greatest entrance in cinema history. Shaft, his big-screen debut, begins with Roundtree emerging from the subway and striding confidently on to New York’s 42nd street on a wintry morning. Neatly groomed afro, moustache and sideburns, smart suit, polo neck and long, tailored leather coat. The hi-hats and wah-wah guitar of Isaac Hayes’ funky theme tune get going. Long-distance cameras track him from high above and close cameras frame him heroically from below. He struts through the bustling streets as if he owns the place, surveying the scene, jaywalking and stopping the traffic, flipping the bird at yellow cabs, stopping to engage with local characters. It’s like Roundtree arrived fully formed.
It’s difficult to appreciate from today’s perspective the impact Shaft made in 1971, and Roundtree, who died on Tuesday, aged 81, was a huge part of that. He wasn’t just “the first Black action hero”, he introduced a whole new type of Black masculinity to mainstream cinema. Where previous Black stars such as Sidney Poitier had played civil, principled, unthreatening and asexual characters (or insulting caricatures), Roundtree’s Shaft was heroic, sexual, wisecracking and unapologetically, proudly Black. He was in the hard-boiled private detective mould but he wasn’t emulating white precedents and he certainly didn’t look up to white people. Or anyone else. One of my favourite lines is when he visits the office of the white detective, Lt Androzzi. “Have a chair John,” he says. Shaft snaps back: “I don’t like yer chair.”
And despite the fact that he was a handsome, well-groomed dude with a stylish Greenwich Village apartment, a “private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks”, as Hayes’ theme tune puts it, the movie doesn’t gloss over the social reality; its on-location shoots now feel like a time-capsule documentary, capturing the messy streets, seedy bars and crumbling tenements. When someone asks Shaft if he has a problem he replies: “Yeah, I got two of ’em: I was born Black and I was born poor.”
Shaft came out at the tail end of the Black power movement but it was by no means militant. Director Gordon Parks, a renowned photojournalist, knew the landscape well. He had photographed members of the Black Panther party for Life magazine a few years before. They even asked Parks to join them; he said the camera was his weapon. But as Roundtree’s Shaft negotiates a fractured, volatile 1970s New York, he moves between, and mediates between, all factions. He engages with the Black militants – the fictionalised “Lumumbas” – but he doesn’t want what they’re selling. If anything, he’s concerned with preventing a race war, as he moves uptown and downtown between the Harlem underworld, the Italian mafia and the white police. Even in the bedroom, he has liaisons with a Black woman and a white woman. He really is a sex machine to all the chicks. To see a Black character at the centre of the action, calling the shots and winning the day (and sleeping with a white woman) was nothing short of revolutionary.
Roundtree has said when he first met Gordon Parks to audition for the role, Parks showed him a fashion ad from a magazine and said: “We’re looking for someone like this.” The model in the ad was Roundtree himself. A lifelong New Yorker, he had been spotted by a modelling agent, and had been part of the celebrated Negro Ensemble Company for two years when the role came along. He often credited Parks for creating the Shaft persona – Parks even sent Roundtree to his own tailor to suit him up – but the role fit him like a glove, thanks to Roundtree’s charisma, physicality and languorous ease in front of the camera.
The part never really rubbed off him. Shaft made Roundtree a genuine star, and broke down doors to a new era of Black-centred cinema (like Parks, Roundtree hated the term “Blaxploitation” – “there is nothing exploitative about what I’ve done,” he once said). And even if he never found another part like it, he was rarely out of work over the next half century. He appeared in the smash-hit TV drama Roots, in disaster movie Earthquake, and in Korean war movie Inchon alongside Laurence Olivier, Jacqueline Bisset and Toshirô Mifune. He had bit parts in everything from Magnum PI to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to Desperate Housewives. But he returned to the Shaft role again and again: in two 1970s sequels, the decent Shaft’s Big Score! (again with Parks) and less successful Shaft in Africa (without Parks), plus a short-lived Shaft TV series. He also passed the torch in two reboots, in 2000 and 2019, now playing the elder of a Shaft dynasty, although not even Samuel L Jackson was cool enough to fill Roundtree’s leather trenchcoat.
Off-screen as well, Roundtree adopted something of a Shaft-like persona, flamboyantly dressed and bedecked in rings and necklaces. But beneath it all, he retained a certain humility and gratitude for his success. He seemed to have come to terms with being primarily associated with a single role. In one interview he said his father had told him to stop complaining about it, and that “a lot of people leave this earth not being known for anything.” Roundtree leaves this earth very well known for having permanently changed the culture.
• The subheading of this article was amended on 26 October 2023 to correct a misspelling of Richard Roundtree’s name.
