A baaad mother--

Shaft

(1971)

Forty-one years ago I was a little too young and way too white to see this, and it's just as well. An older man, one more steeped in cinema, can appreciate director Gordon Parks's meticulous grounding of his story and his protagonist in the private-eye tradition: the maverick who's almost as big a pain in the ass to the police as to the bad guys, not excepting his one friend on the force. And a much older Caucasian whose whiteness has eroded at least a bit over the years can at least imagine what a thrill it must have been for a black audience, maybe especially a young black audience (but maybe not), just 3 years after Dr. King's assassination, to watch a black dick with all the insouciance of generations of Spades and Marlowes, but not caring about all those white dicks, just reveling in the racial pride of this bad motherfucker's fuck-you to the man. Even Isaac Hayes's Oscar-winning theme song, which to a 17-year-old central Illinois white boy was just sort of academically cool; there seemed a tincture of minstrelsy about it that was supplied not by the source but by the audience. Contextually, it's an amazing song, part of an amazing score (also Oscar nominated) for an amazing film, and thanks to DirecTV for the free sample of Cinemax that encouraged me to scrape off a few more barnacles of residual racism.