Mr. Majestyk 1974 A Movie A Day Day 88

When Charles Bronson passed away a few years ago, I was sad to notice that it caused barely a ripple in the entertainment press. This was a guy that in the 1960s was in the three greatest action adventure films of the decade. No one else was in both "The Magnificent Seven" and "The Dirty Dozen". In addition he was featured with his Magnificent Seven co-star Steve McQueen in "The Great Escape". He was also in the Sergio Leone classic, "Once Upon a Time in the West". So from an historical point he represented a connection to cinema history that was unparalleled at the time. In the 1970's, Bronson was the go to action star of his day. Bruce Willis will have to make movies for another ten years to come close to the output of Bronson. He was the star of the controversial "Death Wish", which was the focus of more media attention and press in 1974, then any of the so called cutting edge films of today. His passing was noted in a few small articles and a couple of clips. He deserved a retrospective on his career. That may actually be the next blog I start.

This is one of the many mid-level action films he made that populated my teen years. If "The Mechanic" had been a summer film, I would probably have done that film first. I knew the dialogue and plot down pat. I saw it dozens of times, Mr. Majestyk, I probably only saw three or four times. I have not revisited it since those days and it was a pretty good trip to take. The story concerns a melon farmer, who crosses paths with a contract killer, and he has to maneuver the police and the bad guys for the duration of the film. This movie has a high action content but it is not as violent as many of the other Bronson films of the seventies. There is a little bit of a migrant worker story, but you don't get Charles Bronson to deliver a social message, you want someone to kick ass.

Al Letteri plays the killer. He is best known as Solozo, the drug importer than is the sparking point in "The Godfather". He was a big, beefy looking guy with ethnic features and he seemed to get pigeon-holed into heavy parts. He also showed up in the Steve McQueen vehicle "The Getaway". It is maybe somewhat a stretch because he delivers many of his lines with a speech impediment. He sounds like he has a heavy lisp. His character is after Bronson for personal reasons that stem from some of the events in the movie. Sometimes he seems single minded about getting even, and other times, it appears he is rushing to get it out of the way so he can move on. There is not a lot of consistency in the character. His girlfriend shows up but is barely a part of the story, and we wonder what would draw her to him in the first place. Steve Kolso, plays a local thug trying to strong arm Bronson into hiring his picking crews. This guy was in dozens of early 70's movies, usually playing a sneaky bad guy. He plays one of the cops after Kowalski in Vanishing Point.

Most of the tough guy characters that Bronson played had some background that explained why they could be so badass. Mr. Majestyk is supposed to be a former Army Ranger and a Silver Star winner, he has drifted into Colorado, to become a watermelon farmer and all he is concerned about in the movie is getting his crop in. I remember seeing a Dirty Harry movie where killing his partner got him irritated but someone kicking his dog sets him off and the bad guys suffer more for the dog then anything else. Here there is a similar trauma, the thing that most sets off Bronson is the bad guys machine gunning his watermelon crop. That scene is the one thing I remembered best about this movie. The watermelons are exploding all over the warehouse and it just looked cool.Of course there will be a comeuppance. There are a lot of good chases through the mountains and pastures of the farms in the area. The crooks try to free the killer in an attack on the streets of a small town and all kinds of hell breaks loose. When Bronson finally takes a shotgun to the riff raff we are very satisfied with the outcome.

I made the comparison to Bruce Willis earlier. Bronson usually played stoic characters that had their own code. Today, the protagonist is full of quips and comebacks that sound like they could have been written for a sketch comedy show. There is only one such line in this movie, it is set up early on and then it makes up the final confrontation with one of the bad guys. In-between, we had very few lines from the star but plenty of star presense. Bronson made films up until just a few years before his death. They were never as great as the stuff that came out in the 1970's, when Charlie Bronson ruled the matinees and deserved to be the big star that he was.

THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY 1978 A Movie A day Day 87

1978 was the height of the disco era. In the first three months of the year, the Bee Gees had five top ten songs in the same week. John Travolta was nominated for an Academy Award, and the music was everywhere. Dolores and I were going into our senior year of college and we loved going out, seeing movies, listening to music and eating well. We were not big party people, certainly not in the way people ask today if you party. We went to college parties and enjoyed ourselves but we never learned to dance, I did not drink and neither of us got high. So it is a little strange that we enjoyed this time in the country so much. We listened to Kiss in the car all the time, and went to concerts, but we could not be part of that "Death to Disco" crowd that sometimes came out, because as far as we were concerned it was innocuous fun. Today's movie came out in that summer and I remember seeing it with my beautiful girlfriend, and we were almost certainly wearing polyester, even if we weren't going dancing.

This is the movie that earned an Academy Award for disco music. "Last Dance" is a perfectly good disco song, and Donna Summer is always terrific. When we saw her at the Hollywood Bowl a few years ago, she was still great in her voice and the music always gets people up and moving even if they don't dance. I hate however, that the finest composers of what was labeled "Disco" music, the Brothers Gibb, never received any Oscar mention. Their songs from "Saturday Night Fever" an excellent movie and THE soundtrack of the disco era were ruled ineligible because some elements of the music originated before the contract to do the movie soundtrack was signed. So, three months after the Academy gives it's award for 1977 to the treacle Debbie Boone song, this movie came out. The next year the music guild in the Academy seemed to be trying to make good by giving an award to Paul Jabara's song played at the end of the movie. It's a good thing that most of the guild did not realize he also acted in this film. His role as Carl, the obnoxious near-sighted horn-dog that got locked in the stairwell, almost ruins the movie.

There is really not a plot to the movie, it takes place almost in real time, the hours between 10 pm and 12 am. There are several sets of people that end up at a flashy disco called "The Zoo", and there are little stories behind each one. There are two teen girls trying to win a dance contest, two working girls out looking to find someone they can stand, an older married couple out on their anniversary, and two average guys looking to hook up. Throw in some wanna be singer subplot, a hot funk band, a sleazy club owner and a wiseguy DJ and you have a movie. I suspect that this was really a chance to sell a soundtrack. RSO records had the biggest selling soundtrack in the world with the "Fever" collection. Neil Bogart, the guy that brought us Kiss with his start-up record company, must have eyed that success and thought to himself, "Casablanca Records" can do that too. I never owned the soundtrack to TGIF, but I'm sure they made a bundle.

It is fun to see Jeff Goldblum and Debra Winger in this movie. Neither was well known at the time, and now both have probably faded from the public eye a bit. Goldblum has always been a favorite around our house because if JAWS is our crack, then Jurassic Park is our catnip. Here he plays the disco owner, who apparently sleeps with half the women in the club. His goal this evening is to score with the straight married woman in order to win a bet. Terri Nunn, who later was the lead singer for Berlin, is one of the teen girls. Donna Summer plays, guess what, an aspiring singer. She is actually very good but of course best when the music starts and she is behind the mike.

The whole vibe of the movie is loose. It simply wants to entertain for a couple of hours and sell some music. There is a nice dance number in the parking lot that looks like it must have been pretty athletic to do. I could have lived without the computer dating couple. There is a fair amount of drug use in the movie, which makes it all the more revealing that this is a 1970's film. The casual attitudes toward recreational drugs is reflected in a PG rating for the film. I don't think the rating is wrong, but I do see how the world has changed in some of it's attitudes. To me the best thing about the movie has always been that the reason the teen girls wanted to win the dance contest, was so they could buy Kiss tickets. Rock and Roll All Night you disco lovers.

THE WILBY CONSPIRACY 1975 A Movie A Day Day 86

THE WILBY CONSPIRACY Trailer - ARTISTdirect Music


This is an interesting movie for a number of historical reasons. The kids growing up today do not live in a world where the majority of the population of South Africa is subjected to harsh and repressive rules imposed by a minority of the population. Apartheid has been gone for almost twenty years now. Nelson Mandela is a revered world figure who served as President of his country after getting out of prison in that same country. Last year the movie Invictus, told the story of South Africa ultimately embracing it's largely white rugby team in a story of reunification. It was a beautiful ideal, but the movie failed in part because it seemed political and most of the young audience today was not exposed to the brutality that existed in South Africa before they were born. They largely lack a context.

The Wilby Conspiracy, provides a kind of context. It is a fictional action story but it is set in a very realistically portrayed 1970's South Africa. In those days, a black man needed a pass to be on the streets, the blacks were largely limited to "reservation" style tribal lands to live. The power of the police to detain, imprison and even kill was unchallenged. Civil disobedience, violence, worldwide political pressure, and finally the inability of those in power to stomach what would be required to keep the system, lead to it's downfall. Wilby is set before the death of activist Steven Bikko, and the revelations that accompanied his death. Sidney Pointier plays a convicted rebel, for whom charges are being dropped after being imprisoned for ten years. His lawyer is a woman that champions reform in South Africa, and she has a boyfriend as she is separated from her husband. The new boyfriend is played by Michael Caine. As the three of them are leaving the prison, police checking passes assault them on the streets and suddenly they find themselves on the run. It turns into a mismatched buddy picture without the humor and instead, surrounded by intrigue and betrayal.

There are many examples of the injustices that people in South Africa suffered illustrated in the movie. The suppression of classes extends to the large Indian community in S.Africa as well. Saeed Jaffry plays an Indian dentist that is involved with the revolutionaries. This same year he co-starred with Michael Caine again in the "Man Who Would Be King". He is good in both performances, but I have loved the Man Who Would Be King for 35 years and Billy Fish is one of the reasons. His associate in this movie is played by Persis Khambatta, the actress featured in the first Star Trek Movie (She has a shaved head there). She later co-stars with Rutger Hauer in Nighthawks, Hauer is in this movie as the pilot ex-husband of Caine's girlfriend lawyer. (Got all that?) By the way, Caine and Hauer are also in the cast together in Batman Begins. This movie is it's own little Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Nicol Williamson, plays the security officer in charge of exploiting the situation to recover lost treasure, or at least that is what it seems.

There are some good lines in the movie and a few solid action scenes. The South African security forces are as villainous as you would expect. Williamson's second in command is a sadistic racist in a position of power that he enjoys exploiting. After humiliating the lawyer with a physical search by a doctor, he uses the notion of an even deeper search as a motivation to break her. The gleam in his eye as he suggests a more painful repeat of a body cavity search is disgusting. If this movie were made five years later, the retribution he receives would have been visualized in a more satisfying manner. Here it is simply conventional. Williamson also deserved different, but I don't want to give too much away. I once gave an extemporaneous speech on Apartheid, defending the Afrikaner position. I was looking to be distinct in the round and hoping to move into another elimination round (it did not work). I must say that I can't disagree with the judges, that it was hard to defend that point of view. I'm sorry I did it, because it really was indefensible. There are double crosses and hidden agendas in the movie throughout it's run. The action used in the final confrontation is visually interesting, but logically stupid.

I think Art and I saw this movie at the Temple Theater, but it could have been the Alhambra. I'm sure it was a double bill but I can't remember what the other feature could have been. This movie is largely forgotten, as illustrated by the fact that the only video on line for it is a TV promo. The trailer on the DVD does a good job of selling this as an action picture. That is not a misleading sales pitch, but the movie was more politically charged and that is missing to a large degree. Oh yeah, there is one really big laugh right at the end of the movie. The usual disclaimer appears saying that this is a work of fiction and does not represent true events in South Africa. I can just hear 18 million black South Africans roaring at that line.

Apocalypse Now 1979 A Movie A Day Day 85

I put his movie off till the end for a couple of reasons; first it has always been difficult to watch because of the hyper psychedelic style it is shot in, and second because my opinion on it changes much like my opinion on Rollerball. Each time I see the movie I have a different impression of it's strengths and weaknesses. I am not sure my comments will be consistent, but they will be honest. There is in fact much to be admired about the film from a technical point of view but the story seems so weighted against American action in Vietnam, that it is difficult to judge outside of the political issues that surround it. Francis Ford Coppola was the greatest film maker of the 1970's. He wrote the Oscar winning screenplay for Patton, he directed the Godfather (considered by many as the greatest film ever made), he co-wrote and directed the Godfather Part 2 (The Greatest Film ever made), wrote and directed the Best picture Nominee, the Conversation, and produced American Graffiti, as well as just about everything on this movie. That is a ten year streak that has not been matched by anyone when it comes to quality. In that context I can render a largely favorable opinion of the movie.

Apocalypse Now opened in the Summer of 1979 at the Cinerama Dome, in an exclusive engagement. One thing that I recall about how exclusive it was is that there were no on-screen credits shown for the movie, not even a title card. The credits were provided to the audience on a brochure that you received in the theater. I can't recall who went with me that first time, it may have been Rusty, my Dad's friend that I have mentioned before. My memory of the second time I saw the movie was much more vivid. Rick Rollino and I had gone Christmas shopping and we were at the Del Almo Mall down in the South Bay. It had been a long day and I think originally we went in to see "10", and maybe we did, but I know we also saw Apocalypse just a day or two before Christmas and I thought it was sort of a strange way to spend a day that close to the holiday. As I recall, our reaction to the movie was very strong and positive at the time. Rick if you read this, maybe you could comment on your memory here.

There are so many beautiful and horrifying moments in the film, that it overcomes some of the pretentiousness it falls into at the end. The opening double exposure of the helicopters and the ceiling fan in Captain Willard's Saigon hotel room is brilliant. The attack on the village by the air cavalry, accompanied by Wagner's Flight of the Valkyrie is spectacular and thrilling in a way that may not have been intended. Robert Duvall is in the movie for fifteen minutes and steals the whole picture. When the Wagner music is playing and the helicopters are attacking, it is really stirring, war with a soundtrack is another one of those clever twists that made the movie distinct. Right after that scene is when things start to go awry. The USO show is shot very effectively and the mayhem and imagery of the lights against the dark of the night and the water is magnetic. The problem is that this is where the ambiguous messages start to get a be pompous. The V.C. idea of a USO show is a cold bowl of rice? The immediate implication is that we are too weak in comparison to have ever had a chance to win. John Milius co-wrote the screenplay, and he may well have contributed to the Nietzsche philosophy lesson. Later when Willard is looking at Kurtz's journal, he comes across the phrase "Drop the Bomb, eliminate them all". If this is an anti-war movie, I guess the strategy is to show that war has to be so ruthless that it can never be waged. Of course that is a lot clearer than what happens in the last forty-five minutes of the picture.

From the time the Captain's boat arrives at the Colonel's camp, until the final resolution, we have an acid trip masquerading as a screenplay. Part of the problem was apparently Marlon Brando showed up so far overweight and so under prepared, that they have to shoot him in half light most of the time and he makes up a lot of the dialogue. Dennis Hopper shows up and was clearly spaced out, and his frenzied improvisational lines are probably quoted by fans of this film in a geek like manner similar to our quoting JAWS or Star Wars. The killing of the water buffalo in these scenes is reportedly real. which makes all the dead bodies and dismembered limbs in the background more disgusting than horrifying. As I listened to the music in the third act, I was reminded of the modern symphony music we heard at Disney concert hall a few years ago. As part of the "Tristan" project, a multi-media presentation accompanied the bleak music, and it sounded like a sustained violin note with images of fog in the background for twenty minutes. This was one of the first movies to use synthesizers for the majority of the score. I looked and the music was done by the director's father, an accomplished musician, but Francis is given a co-credit on the music and my guess is that the repetitive two note bass is his contribution.

I watched this on my laserdisc player and the images were quite good. I imagine the DVD versions are superior to even this. The movie was re-edited for a different version several years ago and called Apocalypse Now Redux. Unlike Lucas with his tinkering on the Star Wars film, Coppola is not claiming this is a definitive version, but just an alternate take on the film. I have yet to see it so maybe a future post will make some comparisons. I am a little worried because my disc player was very temperamental in trying to run this movie. I don't want to pack all my discs up and turn them into crap in the garage, but if I can't keep the player working, I will have to, or try and find a new player. If my laserdisc give out, at least we had one last harrah with a brilliant mess of a movie.

The Villain 1979 A Movie A Day Day 84

I have virtually no memory of seeing this in a theater, although it seems unlikely that I would have missed it. I know I saw it on Select TV after we were married and I may even have it recorded on a videotape in a box in the Garage. Those of you not familiar with Select TV, it was an over the air scrambled channel that required a decoder box. Before cable TV was widely available, if you wanted subscriber television in Southern California, you had two choices, On-TV and Select-TV. On-TV had a good choice of sports programming that was part of the package you would buy, but Select had the wider movie choices. It was clearly a different time, because the channels were not scheduled 24 hours a day, and every month you had to program in a code that the company sent you to de-scramble the image. When we were first married, we had to get permission from Mr. Foley, our 83 year old landlord, to put a special antenna on the roof of the apartment building. When cable TV came in, the two companies merged into On-Select. They had a terrific little program guide each month that I always looked forward to. I held on to the guides for twenty five years, and through them out reluctantly just a couple of years ago.

This movie came out three years before Conan the Barbarian and five years before the Terminator. Schwarzenegger was a familiar celebrity, but he was not yet a movie star, so he was not the main selling point of the picture. Kirk Douglas is again a cowboy in one of my blog entries, but this time he is not to be taken seriously. Basically, he plays Wile E. Coyote, to Arnold and Ann Margret's roadrunner. It is essentially a live action cartoon. It must have seemed that the casting of the Austrian Oak as Handsome Stranger, was amusing, but I don't really think it sustains itself. Douglas is funny at times but the timing is often off on the movie and jokes fall flat. There was nothing flat about Ann Margaret, she was still a big star at the time and at the height of her mature beauty stage.

There is a very basic plot about a banker using a bad man to rip off a miner and his daughter. That sets up all the set pieces that occupy the middle of the picture. We go from one disastrous scheme to another, as the villain, Cactus Jack, falls off of mountains, is run over by boulders, and run down by trains. Explosions never work the way he plans them and he never succeeds in slowing down the progress of the miner's daughter "Charming" and the "Handsome Stranger" who is supposed to protect here. The main problem is that as much as Douglas works it, he can't get an exasperated smile or a crooked eyebrow to work the way an animated character like Wile E. Coyote could. The set up of the stunts needs different music, and we need to see something funny during the time that Cactus Jack is puzzling out his next approach. As a consequence the timing always seems off.

In the seventies, Warner Bros. often re-edited together classic cartoons with short bits of new material to try to make a feature length release for kids to watch in theaters. Most of those movies run into the same problem, the repetitiveness of the gags undermines our interest and enjoyment, and the added narrative slows the proceedings down. The makers of the Roger Rabbit cartoons got that everything was about timing, and the six minutes of energy in a single cartoon is a lot more entertaining then a lengthy movie with the jokes repeated. There are many clever ideas in the Villain, but they don't pay off with a big laugh, usually they only earn a slight smile. For example, the real co-star with Douglas is the horse that he rides. "Whiskey" has a mischievous streak, and more facial expression than Schwarzenegger. Try as he might, he can't quite pull off enough of a look to get the joke across as an animated character could.

There are some funny songs in the movie including the title track. They repeat the theme quite often and that hurts it's charm a bit. At the end of the movie, there is a sequence where the Cactus Jack character is accelerated in his scenes, mimicking a cartoon character more directly. That actually got a laugh from me but only at the end of the movie. Strother Martin is in the movie, although he has no scenes with Kirk Douglas or Arnold. The one section that he is in does not give him much chance to shine. Jack Elam, the great crooked eyed actor is also wasted as the banker. The funniest performer in the supporting cast is Foster Brooks. He was a comedian whose regular bit consisted of a drunk routine, He does it in the movie to good effect. I never cared much for his act when I saw it on TV, but it worked great in the four or five minutes he was on-screen in this movie. The director was Hal Needham, a stunt coordinator turned director, well known for doing several Burt Reynolds comedy films. Unfortunately, they are not the great Burt comedies, but some of his late seventies outings where he simply mugs for the camera. He was doing a good job on the stunts, and he shot Monument Valley, much like an old cartoon, but there is an energy and pace that makes this picture just sit there. I said SIT there.

Bluebeard 1972 A Movie A Day Day 83

This is a weird movie. Some of the weirdness comes from the European sensibility with which it was made. Much of the weirdness is suggested by the scenario. Contemporary audiences might find it weird because of the pacing and acting styles. The source of the weirdness is the movie however, it is simply a strange piece of storytelling. The film balances between comedy and horror, and never quite succeeds at either. Richard Burton was a movie star and an actor. He had great gifts as witnessed by the multiple Academy Award nominations heaped on him, but he was also a flawed human being. He drank too much, suffered from the melancholia of other Welsh Actors, and could be a world class prick. Today, people see Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and imagine the greatest movie stars in the world married. It is a good story, but Elizabeth Taylor was more beautiful than Angelina, and Richard Burton was more talented than Brad, and they were married to each other twice as often as Bradgelina. Burton needed money like Elvis did, and he took what producers were willing to offer that payed. He had better taste than movies like this and "The Klansmen", but baby needed another diamond. I saw this movie with a guy named Scott Moore. He was a guy I met in algebra class my freshman year of high school. We were pretty good friends for that year, but he found some other people that he fit in with a little better, and we sort of stopped hanging out. His mother was in her late thirties when we met and she was divorced from his dad. She had to work to support him and his brother and sister. She tried to be sort of hip, she drove a Lincoln and dressed in mini-skirts, and she was very permissive with her kids. Which is how a couple of fourteen year olds got tickets to this R rated movie playing on a single screen theater(the El Rey on Main Street in Alhambra) where the ushers would know if you were under age. This may have been playing with another film featuring Richard Burton, based on the book Candy. Candy was a Psychedelic sex novel turned into a movie with a whole bunch of stars in it. It came out in 1968, but as I said before, distributors in those days would find films to match with the current feature to play at the local theaters on a double bill. I suspect that the presence of Mr. Burton in both movies was the reason they were together. Both films are highly sexualized, and the blood pressure of a fourteen year old, seeing them together, would be almost too much to imagine. The movie turns out to be concerned with impotence and an oedipus complex. Burton is a hero of the first world war for the German flying corp. He has injuries that explain the unique color of his beard and why he will not shave, those injuries appear to go much deeper than his face. After the war he meets a woman, falls in love and marries her. She is killed in a hunting accident, and a dozen years later he falls in love with an American entertainer, that he makes his bride. She is terrorized by creepy events at the castle and discovers a large refrigerated room that contains a number of frozen corpses of women. It is then that the Baron recounts his romantic history and we learn his murderous ways. It takes nearly an hour to get to the meat of the story, and the set up is filled with unusual events and scenery. It feels like a Gothic horror piece in the beginning but when we get to the murders, it is more like a bloody Hammer horror film. The color palate of the movie is strange. There is a rich velvety textured wallpaper in the mistress of the houses bedroom. It is blood red, but we see in some of the flashbacks that the same wallpaper in the same room was at one time deep blue. I suppose this is to correspond with Bluebeard's onset of murderous behavior. He also has a fascination with photographing his victims after death, highlighting broad outlines, and turning the image into intricate web based graphic images. The costumes are outlandish, one of his wives has a bright pink outfit that makes her look like a flamingo as he stalks her through the castle. Burton twice wears the most ridiculous purple,lavender set of tails. He looks like a teenager from the 1970s going to a prom. The best thing about the movie, other than the main features I will get to in a second, is the atmospheric music from Ennio Morricone. I am a fan of his work in the Leone westerns, The Mission and my favorite "The Untouchables". Here he provides a creepy theme that sets the tone for the picture and punctuates a number of scenes very effectively. OK, the real attraction of this movie for a kid my age in 1972 was the nudity. Every actress except Raquel Welch is topless at some point in the movie. The nudity is used as titillation to set up the murders and remind us of Blubeard's impotence. OK, it's really there to turn us on, and it did. Joey Heatherton was one of those 1960s stars that was famous for being pretty and being on TV. She could not act, she could dance just a little, but the sheer black wrap that she wore in this movie made an impression that I don't ever think I could forget, even if I wanted to, which I don't. She was hot. The murders were gruesome, but often accompanied with some comic flair. I won't give away the punchlines for most of the deaths, but after hearing Burton relay the circumstances of his relationship with each woman, he does not come across as quite the monster we believed. In a couple of cases he could argue justifiable homicide.

Shaft (1971) A Movie A Day Day 82

After the debacle yesterday, I went out in search of more films for the blog. I have sixteen days left and I was down to three movies. My deleting Shaft and Big Jake, put a dent in the movies that I had lined up. I've managed to add three DVDs to my library for the rest of the blog, and I went and found a copy of Shaft at Big Lots of all places. I had had it in my hands several months ago, but I remembered it was coming on TCM so I did not buy it. Dolores and I went through hundreds of discounted DVDs and managed to find one copy of the original Shaft left. They had one of the other Shaft movies, but it was not a summer release so I won't be covering it for this blog. If you are reading this and are unfamiliar with Shaft, you must never have listened to soul music from the 1970s. The theme from Shaft was one of the biggest hits of the decade.

About ten years ago, Shaft was remade with Samuel Jackson in the title role. I love Sam Jackson, he has gotten me into a lot of films that I might otherwise have skipped, but he is also the Michael Caine of today. In an interview once, Caine was asked about an upcoming movie and why he choose it. The interviewer asked, "What's it about?", and Caine replied, "It's about a million dollars, I'll do it." Sam Jackson plays for pay these days. The Shaft remake was a fine summer action movie, and it is much better produced than the 1971 original, but it none of the social cache and it lacks the biggest selling point in the original film, Richard Roundtree. I know he makes a cameo in the new Shaft, but that does not make up the lack of sex appeal from Jackson. He got the badass part right(...he's a bad mother...) but there is no way Jackson is a sex machine to all the ladies.

Of the three reasons to see the original Shaft, Roundtree is the most important. His role was groundbreaking and he played it with all the verve a guy could muster in a low budget film like this. The movie opens with the money shot, there are things to enjoy later, but the credit scene contains the main element of the movie. Shaft is a confident, sexy black man in a white mans world, but he is not taking crap from anyone. He walks down the streets of Manhattan with his head held high and his shoulders straight. He is not shucking and jiving, there is no slouch with attitude, he knows who he is and dares anyone to disagree. His knee length leather coat and dark yellow turtleneck, sell swagger without him having to do much more than walk in a straight line, but he does do more. In 1971, the idea of a sexual black man as your lead was startling, he has a afternoon tryst with his beautiful girlfriend, and the camera lingers on his backside and her hands. The revolutionary part is that he openly engages in inter-racial sexual athletics. Any woman would find him attractive, he is a sex object for all females not just those of one ethnicity. "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner" was only four years earlier and the inter-racial relationship was sold as sanitized by having Sidney Pointer and making him a Doctor. Shaft is picked up by a white girl in a bar, she is clearly the aggressor, and he sends her away when he is done with her like she was a waitress asking if he wanted anything else. If you listen to the end of the trailer, you will hear the announcer proclaim him hotter than Bond, and cooler than Bullet. That is a little hyperbole, but Roundtree does his best to sell it and it works. Eddie Murphy and Denzel Washington as well as Samuel Jackson have Richard Roundtree to thank that Americans can accept a black man as the lead in any kind of picture, not just a social piece. I remember that this was not always the case.

The theme song is the second selling point of the movie. Issac Hayes won the Academy Award for Best song for this piece of driving, soulful, energy. His cool deliver of the lyrics sets the tone for the movie. Like I said, the opening title sequence with Roundtree walking through New York and the music playing over the scene, that is what you want most from the movie. The story is not that interesting and there are no other characters that match up with Shaft at all. Charles Coffi is pretty good as a gruff police Lt., who understands Shaft and tries to use him to know what's going on. Shaft would never say they were friends but they appear to treat each other with due deference after they wrestle over status issues. The bad guys are nondescript for the most part, and the women are pretty but not really a part of the proceedings. There are some other pieces of music that try to emphasize the racial tension in the world at this point. None of them is quotable or memorable. There have been other movies where the theme song was influential in shaping our perception of the film and main character, but none have ever done it as well as this piece of music.

Finally, the third reason to see the movie is to get a sense of how the world looked at the time. Physically, the New York streets are very clearly shown. As Shaft travels in a taxi uptown, he passes by theaters playing straight features from Hollywood, right next to porn houses peddling smut on a big marquee for all to know. The clothes of the time are authentic, not exaggerated retelling s of the time, but reflective of what people might wear. Most of all, you get a sense of the tension that exits in racial relationships. Not every white person was hated, but plenty were and deserved to be. Not every black was a revolutionary, but they often felt outside. Outsiders and insiders were the real lines between people, and color was a symptom of that, but not necessarily the cause. Shaft was a big part of the Blaxplotation era, but it was a success with wider audiences as well. It moves a little slow and some of the actors are painfully amateurish, but the lead and the music are worth your hundred minutes. If you don't have the time, treat yourself to the opening five minutes below.