Description
While the Black Power movement was reshaping America, trailblazing director Gordon Parks made this groundbreaking blockbuster, which helped launch the blaxploitation era and introduced a new kind of badder-than-bad action hero in John Shaft (Richard Roundtree, in a career-defining role), a streetwise New York City private eye who is as tough with criminals as he is tender with his lovers. After Shaft is recruited to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a Harlem mob boss from Italian gangsters, he finds himself in the middle of a rapidly escalating uptown vs. downtown turf war. A vivid time capsule of gritty seventies Manhattan that has inspired sequels and multimedia reboots galore, the original Shaft is studded with indelible elements—from Roundtree’s sleek leather fashions to the iconic funk and soul score by Isaac Hayes.
Two-Blu-Ray Special Edition Features
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Alternate uncompressed stereo soundtrack remastered with creative input from Isaac Hayes III
- Shaft’s Big Score!, the 1972 follow-up to Shaft by director Gordon Parks
- New documentary featuring curator Rhea L. Combs, film scholar Racquel J. Gates, filmmaker Nelson George, and music scholar Shana L. Redmond
- Soul in Cinema: Filming “Shaft” on Location (1971)
- Archival interviews with Parks, musician Isaac Hayes, and actor Richard Roundtree
- New program on Hayes’s score featuring Redmond
- New interview with costume designer Joseph G. Aulisi
- New program on the Black detective featuring scholar Kinohi Nishikawa and novelist Walter Mosley
- A Complicated Man: The “Shaft” Legacy (2019)
- Trailers
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by film scholar Amy Abugo Ongiri
New cover by Bill Sienkiewicz
Criterion Collection:
Since 1984, the Criterion Collection has been dedicated to publishing important classic and contemporary films from around the world in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements. No matter the medium—from laserdisc to DVD and Blu-ray to streaming—Criterion has maintained its pioneering commitment to presenting each film as its maker would want it seen, in state-of-the-art restorations with special features designed to encourage repeated watching and deepen the viewer’s appreciation of the art of film.
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