"I'm Talking About Shaft" - The Novel and the Film

In March James and I watched the classic 1971 blaxploitation detective film Shaft.  It was directed by Gordon Parks and written by Ernest Tidyman and John D.F. Black, adapted from Tidyman's novel of the same name.  I already knew from researching my piece on High Plains Drifter (1973), a film also written by Tidyman, that Shaft was based on a novel, so going into the film I figured there was a better than average chance that I would end up also reading the book.

Which of course I then did.

I quite liked the movie, which I knew of through cultural osmosis but had never seen, but I think I really liked the book and it was very interesting to think about the adaptational choices made in translating it to film.

Background

The Novel

Ernest Tidyman (1928-1984), a white author from Ohio, wrote Shaft as a commission for Macmillan editor Alan Rinzler.  Per Steve Aldous in an article for the crime fiction blog The Rap Sheet:

It was in late 1968 or early 1969 that Rinzler touted the idea for a black detective hero to literary agent Ron Hobbs. Rinzler had been involved in the changing social culture of that era, initially through his work fundraising and ghost-writing for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in New York in 1964. He also worked for Simon & Schuster at the time, editing, promoting, and publishing works that highlighted the plight of black America--including Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), which detailed the struggles of growing up in Harlem. ...

Hobbs was the only African-American literary agent in New York City, and Rinzler figured he could come up with the necessary writer to fulfill his brief. Hobbs, however, suggested a white writer by the name of Ernest Ralph Tidyman, who had only recently set up as a freelance writer, after previously enjoying a long career in newspaper journalism in Cleveland and Manhattan.

Tidyman wrote about 13 novels with 7 of them being Shaft novels.  (Steve Aldous's website has a lot of interesting information on Tidyman, by the way.)

Shaft was published in 1970.  The novel was received well enough to sell about half a million copies in a year and get optioned for a major studio movie adaptation.

The Film

The film released in 1971 and was very successful, making around $13 million against a $1 million or so budget, an extremely good outcome for MGM, which was on a bit of a losing streak.   It also won Isaac Hayes a Best Original Song Oscar for the now iconic Shaft theme song.  Steve Aldous's list of Tidyman's awards includes an NAACP Image award in 1971 but I can't find an actual list of winners by category for that year so I don't know if Tidyman won it as an individual for the screenplay or if it was a collective award that Shaft the film won.

Shaft also helped the blaxploitation genre cross into the mainstream.  To put it overly simplistically, blaxploitation films are action films that center around Black stories and Black protagonists.  Shaft did not invent the blaxploitation film by any means but its popularity ushered in the explosion of them in the 1970s.

Shaft's African-American director Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was a very interesting man.  He was a polymath who was a photographer, director, author, poet, artist, musician, and composer.  He was also the cofounder of Essence magazine.

Tidyman's co-writer for the film, John D.F. Black (1932-2018) looks to have worked mostly in television, though he has a few not made-for-TV movie writing credits.  I didn't find too much about him online.

One other thing about this film that is really important to note is that it, in addition to being pretty good, is really significant to film and to American culture.  I'm not the right person to unpack all of that, but Racquel J. Gates, a film professor at Columbia University definitely is.  In the Criterion supplemental featurette "Revisiting Shaft" Gates says this about the film:

So one of the things that I think can get lost when we only talk about Shaft in terms of the blaxploitation era, the blaxploitation genre, however, we're defining that, is we lose the sort of broader context of the significance of this film within American history. And I think we really get a sense of that in the cinematography, in the way that the film is playing a bit with form. ...the opening scene feels, like, very kind of classic Hollywood prestige film, right?  Like the crane shot ... we'd start with this bird's eye view and kind of sweep down into the street. And so in that ways, it sort of connected to MGM's sort of legacy, right? But at the same time, we get the realism, we get the incorporation of cinema veritae, we get the on the ground shots, we get some experimentation with sort of overexposure, and the sex scenes with those beautiful colored circles that are sort of obscuring things. And so, it's signaling sort of a new wave of American cinema, where there will still be sort of elements of classic Hollywood, but also experimentations with form, with style, with narrative. I think we also see that innovation with the soundtrack, and Isaac Hayes providing not just a score, but a score that gives us narrative information about who this character is, as well as sort of connects itself to urban spaces and Black music traditions.

A lot more ink has (rightfully) been spilled about Shaft's importance but my unqualified ass is not going to attempt to summarize it.

The Plot

Shaft the novel and Shaft the film have pretty much the exact same plot, though some of the mechanics of said plot are a little different in the film. (More on this later.)  John Shaft is a Black private detective in New York City who gets hired by a Harlem crime boss to find the boss's missing daughter.  Shaft is also being recruited by a NYPD Lieutenant to keep him informed about rising tensions (and stockpiled weapons) in Harlem, which he fears is a prelude to a giant bloodbath.  The latter situation ends up being related to the former.

Shaft discovers that the daughter has been kidnapped by the Italian Mafia who plan to use her as a bargaining chip to take the Harlem boss's territory.  He finds her and gets her back.  The end.

Mechanics

Some Notes about the Novel

The novel is written in a fairly close third person, with the narration adopting the perspective of the characters it's following in the kind of free indirect discourse that I talked about in my piece on Madame Bovary.

The novel Is dominated by John Shaft, which is partially why it took me a while to determine for sure that some of the, let's say "nastier" edges of the narration were because of the close perspective and not because of the author's worldview.  (More on this later, too.)

The writing in general was pretty good with some sharp observation and good characterization.  Shaft himself is really well realized and Tidyman manages to deliver some authentically tense sequences, both in situations where Shaft is in physical danger and in situations where Shaft's mind is racing under mental strain.  I don't recall any parts where I thought the writing and exposition were clunky or ham handed.

New York City feels like a real place in the novel and the characters feel specific to it.

Some Notes about the Filmmaking

The movie looks pretty good.  It was obviously filmed on location and there's lots of really cool shots of Shaft walking through the busy city.  I can only assume these were a huge pain in the ass because I don't think they were closing down Time Square and filling the streets with extras.  (In the sequence where Shaft walks through a protest you can see a couple of the participants look at the camera.)  I think this word is overused in general but the opening scene of this film really is iconic and also pretty awesome.

A lot of the film was shot outside in New York's streets which is why it feels so "New York" but that undoubtedly added some technical challenges.  For example in the night scenes outside Buford's building in Harlem it was kind of hard to see what was going on because it looked like the filmmakers were using mostly ambient lighting.  Also some of the conversations that happened in the bustling streets had a lot of ambient city noise.  It didn't make the dialog hard to hear or anything but it was noticeable.

The acting was good with the performers delivering some great, snappy dialog.  Richard Roundtree's Shaft and Charles Cioffi's Lt. Androzzi in particular had a really great rapport and felt like they knew each other.  I thought Moses Gunn as Bumpy Jonas, the crime boss who hires Shaft, gave a really compelling performance.  (Even if his best acting scene was later undercut by an odd choice in the adaptation; more on this later.)

Amy Abugo Ongiri, in her essay "Shaft: Power Moves" for the Criterion release talks about how director Gordon Parks included a lot of references to 1970s Black culture.  Stuff like cameo easter eggs and even the ostensibly cosmetic changing of Knock Persons's name to Bumpy Jonas.  To quote Ongiri:

The character of Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn) is a thinly disguised take on mobster Ellsworth Raymond “Bumpy” Johnson, who was Harlem royalty renowned, along with Stephanie “Madame” St. Clair, for keeping the Italian Mafia out of the neighborhood.

(That's a really clever and subtle change.)

A change that's cosmetic on the surface but actually does have some effect is that the mob boss's daughter in the book is named Beatrice Thomas whereas in the film she is Marcy Jonas.  Film daughter sharing her father's last name reflects kind of a large change in the setup, even if it doesn't practically matter all that much once the events of the story are set in motion.

In the book Beatrice is estranged from her father; she did not even know she was his daughter until she was 14.  Knock Persons kept this secret to protect her.  When she did find out who she was she dropped out of school, got mixed up with drugs, was a frequent patron of the seedier establishments in New York, and was prone to going on benders.  Knock Persons is much less sure what happened to her than his film counterpart.  There's some stuff around this in the film that is kind of head scratching, but I'll get to that later when I talk more about the plot.

By contrast, Marcy Jonas is a model citizen whose parentage is not a secret and she was obviously kidnapped.

Overall I'd say most of the characters in the film were softened a bit from their book versions.   I don't know for sure if this was a decision made by MGM to make the characters more palatable to a mainstream audience or if it was because the filmmakers wanted more positive portrayals of Black characters.

Ongiri, once again in "Shaft: Power Moves," says:

Parks famously wanted to create a film that would allow audiences “to see the Black guy winning.” As modest an ambition as this may seem by today’s standards, it was shockingly bold in 1971, when positive images of African Americans in visual culture were virtually nonexistent.

This sort of statement makes me think the engine for the character changes probably came from Parks, especially since the same essay relates how MGM's contribution to character alteration was pushing to make Shaft white, which...go fuck yourselves.

In addition to Marcy being a college bound straight arrow, Ben Buford's revolutionary credentials have been massively de-emphasized.  Novel Ben is the charismatic leader of an organized and armed group that is constantly dodging arrest by the FBI and CIA.  In the film his group, the Lumumba's, is kind of framed as hapless revolutionary cosplayers.

I've kind of buried the lede here but the character who changed the most in the adaptation is...

Shaft Himself

Richard Roundtree's version of Shaft isn't really the book version but that's due to differences in how the movie character is written.  Film Shaft is the coolest dude in any room.  He's charismatic and not intimidated by anyone; he's at ease and in control.  He has some fantastic and genuinely funny back and forths with Androzzi that shows he is witty and even wryly playful.

Book Shaft is not playful.  He is tense, cornered, and at times feels like he's hanging together by a very thin thread.  Film Shaft is cool, book Shaft mostly feels like he's playing it cool as a cover for some deep seated rage, anxiety, and past trauma.

Roundtree's Shaft can definitely be intimidating but novel Shaft is kind of scary and much more cold blooded.  Even the book's tagline is really aggressive:  "Shaft has no prejudices.  He'll kill anyone - black or white."  That's not bluster either; in line with the softening I mentioned earlier two of the people that film Shaft kills in self-defense are people he outright murders in the book.

About 2/3 of the way into the novel Lt. Anderozzi says of Shaft that "He doesn’t stop to think a lot. He acts. And every ounce of the man is muscle and anger.” (p131)   

The previous 130 pages, most of it from Shaft's perspective, show that this is a fairly astute observation, though the first sentence does miss the mark a bit, if understandably given that Anderozzi hasn't been in Shaft's POV.  Shaft does think a lot; his mind often races, especially when he's idle and feeling out of control.

He's on his back foot for a lot of the novel and it isn't until most of the way through that he finally seizes the initiative, when in a practically manic episode he decides to force a direct confrontation with the Italian Mafia because he knows he can only play cat and mouse so long before they murder him.  It's a risk but he seems to feel better having taken action, even if he tells himself "that he was either one of the coolest of men or the dumbest of bastards to have done it." (p152)

A Complicated Man

The Shaft theme song has the line "He's a complicated man, no one understands him but his woman."  The film character doesn't really earn this but the book character definitely does.  As I mentioned above, novel Shaft is strongly characterized and feels like a complete and legible person which is made possible by the close point of view and the strong interiority of his sections.  The narration is both really revealing and withholding in the best possible way.  Shaft's sections are kind of introspective but information about his past is only glanced at as it bubbles up in his thoughts.

This withholding-ness is really good for rounding out the character without resorting to inelegant lore dumps.  Shaft's mind will briefly skid past a street fight that scarred his face, foster care, social workers, and becoming a soldier "not so much because Uncle Sam wanted him but because a Juvenile Court judge and a probation officer wanted to get rid of him."  These things are mentioned offhand, almost in passing.

You get the impression that his early life was nasty, brutish, and (almost) short, and that his past is something he's always been trying to escape.  There's a telling passage early on about the scar above his eye:

Where had it happened? they might ask. Uptown, he said. It happened uptown. I was trying to kill this cat and he didn’t think I should do that. I was trying to kill myself and he was helping me. (p9)

Shaft's scars from a wound he got in Vietnam seem to loom in his subconscious and are directly linked to the strain he is under, like a trauma waiting to burst out.  The first mention of it is while he is doing an almost frantic workout to burn off fear, anger, and nerves.

Maybe it was the pressure of people coming after him with guns again, maybe it was looking at the scars again, but the memory of how he got them went through his mind. He saw the Vietcong teenager’s wan, weary face peering out of the bunker south of Danang. Peering over the brush-covered length of a rifle that was almost bigger than the kid. Bing, bing, bing. Like that. He had three holes in his left side, he was spinning on his own ankles like a wobbling top and the impartial judgment of his own automatic rifle was somehow chewing its way toward the surprised almond eyes. The medics told Shaft he should have died on the deck of the helicopter that carried him out of the place where his blood had joined the jungle ooze. They told him he should have died at the first medical station of his unit. But they told him he was one tough sonofabitch who was going to live when the base hospital surgeon finished the hurried, harried work of relinking his intestines. Shaft shook the vision from his head as he pulled on the jock strap and the sweatsuit. (p36)

It feels like a devastatingly important event for the character below the surface despite the narration not spending much time on it.  Via the close narration, you know who Shaft is in the present, what he's thinking and what he's doing, but all these little glimpses give some hints as to why he is the way he is.

Book Shaft is far more of an anti-hero than film Shaft who, despite a tendency to be antagonistic to authority, is pretty unambiguously heroic.  Book Shaft is a "very ruthless, ambitious guy (p67)" and he's very mercenary.  Shaft's finding of Beatrice, the driving force of the entire novel, is motivated because of the money and power he could get from her father as well as his own intellectual vanity:

He was also intrigued by the idea that Beatrice could disappear and all the king’s men couldn’t find her. Could he? Why not? Better than they could, he could do what was necessary. (p50)

Unlike in the film, Anderozzi doesn't bother trying to appeal to Shaft's sense of responsibility as a son of Harlem to help head off the conflagration that is brewing there.

The brief windows into Shaft's hard life bring his-out-for-himself nature into focus: he was forged in privation and pain and he's never going to let himself be in that situation again.  His self-centeredness is a defensive response that has cut him off from just about everyone.  As the narration says when Ben Buford is grieving the loss of his men at the hands of the Mafia:

Shaft thought that if he had been anybody else but the thing he had become, he would walk across the kitchen, put his arms around Ben Buford and weep with the man for their brothers. Instead, he offered the cold half inch of reality.  (p93)

"The thing he had become."  Shaft is a hard man but not an unreflective one and there's a mournful undercurrent of loss and regret in him.

Shaft had never felt nostalgia, at least never for anything of his childhood and youth, although he sometimes had a sad feeling that he thought must be like nostalgia over fantasies or thoughts of things he had not known.  (p70)

One difference in book Shaft that I think is really interesting is his fear.  He's not an unflappable machine.  He sees danger everywhere and constantly worries about the very real possibility that he's about to be murdered.  After the tension of being pursued by Knock Persons's men, then having a confrontation with the police, and then actually meeting Persons face to face he, by his own admission, is "freaking out" and "couldn't even think."

“Keep it up, man,” he said aloud, “and about six cats in white coats will come running out of Bellevue to throw nets over you.” (p52)

In that first conversation with the police, when he realizes he's surrounded and Anderozzi tries to get him into a car to talk, he's on high alert.  He doesn't want to go with them for multiple reasons.  He doesn't want the Black shoe shine guys to see him with white cops and he is genuinely afraid of what they could and would do to him as a Black man.

None of you is going to push me in that car back there unless I know why we’re going, where we’re going and how long were going and somebody else, somebody on my side maybe, knows that I’m going. (p13)

Identity

In both the book and the film, Shaft is described as having one foot in the Black world and one in the white one.  This is left implicit by Anderozzi but is said explicitly by Bumpy Jonas / Knock Persons.  (Recall that Jonas and Persons are just the film and book versions of the same character.)

In the film Bumpy says:

Yeah, I want you because you're a black spade detective. And I want you because you got your other foot in whitey's trough.

Knock Persons goes even further in the novel:

You’re a black man. Somewhere inside of you, you know what this girls feeling and what she’s thinking. But you’re also part a white man because of what you do and where you been. And you smart enough to go back and forth between black and white man. That’s what I’m asking you to do. I want you to think for me about this little girl and I want you to go back and forth between being a black man and a white man, and find her for me. (p49)

Persons doesn't just say Shaft can operate in the white world, he says Shaft is literally a part of it and it is a part of him.  I thought Roundtree's Shaft maybe bristled a little at Bumpy's statement but book Shaft doesn't protest Persons's, even in his own thoughts.  Book Shaft is between worlds, a man of no faction, in the white and Black worlds but fully belonging to neither.   

Shaft himself is deeply aware of this.  When trying to get back up after receiving a brutal beating by the Italian Mafia, he thinks this:

Shaft the opportunist, Shaft the uninvolved and detached observer, Shaft the middle-man of whatever race he claimed in the depths of his heart, tried to get up off the edge of the bed to determine if he had the legs for his promise. He was all mouth if he didn’t have them. (p181)

I find that line about "whatever race he claimed in the depths of his heart" to be really intriguing.  It's also completely earned by the narrative and it fits with everything we've seen about this isolated, unmoored character.

The last lines of the book lay out Shaft's almost elegiac desire to lose himself even more after all the violence and fear he's just experienced:

When he got to the airport he would buy a ticket. The first name that came to his head. San Francisco, Paris, Tokyo. The first name that came out. He’d go there. He’d get out of this city, out of these people, out of his own skin someplace. Stockholm, he thought. Rio de Janeiro. He played with names and continents. Nobody would know him, nobody would want him. He would lose himself. He would let the smell of death wash away with each mile, each strange place, each new person he encountered. He wouldn’t even give them his right name. They wouldn’t know who he was or what he was. And that would make them even. (p210)

Homophobia

One last contrast between book and film Shaft that stuck out to me is his pervasive homophobia in the novel, which is not present in the film, even when there was opportunity to include it.

Book Shaft casually and exclusively refers to gay men with a slur.  And it goes beyond just passive disdain; he even goes so far as to arrange a meeting in Central Park after midnight with a gay cashier who had just let Shaft use the phone, a meeting Shaft has no intention of going to that may put the cashier in real danger.  Shaft thinks:

The muggers and that one deserved each other. He hoped the little fart was a karate champion; he would last about ten minutes longer that way. Until somebody stuffed his brown belt in one ear and pulled it out the other. Knotted. (p33)

Yikes.

The only scene in the film where Shaft interacts with a gay character is when Shaft is trying to outmaneuver the Italian hitmen who have staked out his apartment from the No Name Bar across from his home.  He bribes the bartender to let him take his place so he can get some intel.  He and the bartender know each other and seem to be on friendly terms.  The bartender is openly gay and Shaft does not care at all and does not comment or look askance, even when the bartender's homosexuality comes up naturally in a conversation about a woman who just flirted with him.  He's just a guy Shaft knows from the West Village who happens to be gay.   

I said to James after this scene that I was a little surprised that a macho movie from 1971 didn't make a thing of this and just framed and treated the bartender like a person.  This was deliberately added, too, as the character in the book is not gay.

Chalk another one up to the filmmakers softening Shaft's character and also likely making a deliberate progressive statement.

Plot Stuff

There were a few things in the film that were kind of confusing and made me curious about how the book handled them.

The far less important ones were during the final confrontation with the Mafia in the hotel where Marcy was being held.  In this scene, Ben Buford's men dress up like hotel bellhops and cooks for...some reason?  At the end of the day the plan is really just run up and blast the Mafia guys with a firehouse to give Shaft time to get Marcy, so....why the costumes?   I figured this was an inheritance from a more fleshed out and elaborate plan in the book, but it's not.  The confrontation goes down very differently and Buford's men aren't even in the hotel. So...shrug?

Also in the film, before Shaft crashes through the hotel room window to shoot the Mafia guys there's a kind of long setup scene where he's setting this rolled up newspaper on fire.  He throws it through the window before bursting in, but it's really not clear what that did.   It's just a step above using a lit match as a distraction for like half a second before shooting a bunch of people.  My original thought was that it was supposed to be like a big flaming, smoke bomb style distraction that the filmmakers just couldn't practically make work but it's a weird garbled thing from the novel.  In the book Shaft hangs the burning paper outside the Mafia guys' window after essentially setting off a fire alarm and getting the building evacuated.  So the flaming paper is to help convince the Mafia that the building is actually on fire.

So the filmmakers dropped the original "pretend the building is on fire" plan but kept some of the details of it even after changing the climax to the, admittedly more dramatic, "burst in and shoot everyone" plan.

None of that is all that important.  The biggest problem in the film's plotting is the confusion around Shaft going to see Buford, the attack on the meeting, and what Bumpy knows.  In the film, Bumpy Jonas sends Shaft to find Buford.  When Shaft arrives, he's being followed by a Black man, and soon after the shooting starts.

After Shaft and Buford escape and confront Bumpy, Shaft says "Your little caper cost [Buford] five friends last night."  This line in combination with the fact that the man following Shaft was Black and we didn't see any of the shooters made me and James think that maybe Bumpy sent the hitmen to kill Buford?  (Turns out it was the Mafia but we were very unsure for a while.)

And to add even more confusion when Shaft accuses Bumpy of already knowing the Mafia had Marcy before sending Shaft to Buford, Bumpy confirms it.  But, why would Bumpy not have told Shaft about the Mafia and then waste his time finding Buford if he already knew who had Marcy?  And as I mentioned above, this reveal that he knew it was the Mafia the whole time severely undercuts the sincerity of the scene where he tearfully asked Shaft to find his daughter.  He just seems like he's manipulating Shaft for reasons unclear.  It really was kind of bewildering to watch; James and I genuinely weren't sure what was happening and why.

This unfolds a little differently in the novel.  Knock Persons definitely does not know where Beatrice is or if she's even been kidnapped.  Shaft decides to find Buford of his own accord, as Buford knows everyone in Harlem and he figures there's a good chance he actually does know what happened to Beatrice, given how she gets around the scene. And as it turns out Buford does know that the Mafia kidnapped her and that's how Shaft and Persons find out.

Shaft does have a line to Persons that "I said [Buford] knew where Beatrice was.  You knew, too, you dumb bastard" but I read that as Shaft just meaning "she was kidnapped and the people who took her are people you know, this is your fault, and you should have figured this out."  Later after Shaft has seen Beatrice, gotten his ass beat by the Mafia, and been dumped at Persons's house, he says to Persons "But you know who's got her, don't you?" and Persons responds with "I guess I do."  Not "I have this whole time" but essentially "I do now."  It's still a little ambiguous but it was clear to me that Persons genuinely didn't know where Beatrice was which makes the story much less muddled.   

The film made all of this way more complicated for unclear reasons and injected a lot of confusion.

Gallimaufry

• The film is a lot funnier than the novel, with Androzzi and Shaft both having some great zingers.  But the book does have some amusing lines, basically all by Anderozzi.  When Shaft is readying himself to run or fight when the police confront him at the beginning Anderozzi says this:

“Take him first, Johnny,” the lieutenant said with a nod to the plainclothesman. “I’m too old for you.” (p12)

Also this one:

"We will all have to go down to the district attorney’s office and do a routine for them about what a couple of bad bastards these guys were.” “Black bastards.” “Bad bastards. Don’t be paranoid.” “You pretty fancy.” “I used to take night classes.” (p27)

• Director Gordon Parks deserves an entire essay of his own.  I'm not the person for that but he's definitely worth looking into.  Ongiri's essay "Power Moves" relates something about Parks that I think is relevant to how Buford's crew was portrayed in the film:

In his 1997 photo-memoir Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective, Parks recounts that although he both deeply identified with and sympathized with the Black Power revolution, ultimately he couldn't endorse it. "I was black and my sentiments lay in the heart of black fury sweeping the country," he wrote. "I recognized [Black Panther Leader Eldridge Cleaver's] scars and acknowledged my own. Yet we met over a deep chasm of time, the events of which forged different weapons for us... I prefer changing things without violence."

Recall that I mentioned above how Ben Buford's group comes off more as incompetent wannabes than the dangerous revolutionaries they are in the book.  I think maybe that was Parks implicitly condemning revolutionary violence.

• Oh the pearls that must have been clutched in 1971 when Roundtree's Shaft had sex with a white woman on screen.

• Unlike the film that ends with Shaft on the phone with Androzzi about 5 seconds after they get Marcy back, the book has an epilogue.  This takes place some time later and relates how the Police Commissioner testified on Shaft's behalf before the grand jury and convinced them that Shaft had saved a young girl in the course of his licensed PI duties and that the four dead men were Mafia killers and therefore Shaft should not be indicted for murdering them.  The Commisioner did this to repay Shaft for heading off the Mafia war with Knock Persons.

• Buford's group, unnamed in the book, is called "The Lumumbas" in the film.  Patrice Lumumba was the first democratically elected leader in the Congo.  Congolese history at this time (the 1950s and 1960s) is complicated but to oversimplify he was overthrown after a US and Belgium backed coup.  (The Eisenhower administration had earlier made plans for the CIA to assassinate him.)

• Man I can't tell how old anyone in the 1970s is.  Richard Roundtree was 29 (actually about the same age as book Shaft) but if you told me he was 40 I would have believed you.  I had a similar experience when I saw a video of CCR's John Fogarty and assumed he was in his mid 40s and it turns out he was only 23.  I don't have a larger point here.

• In both the book and the film, cabs don't stop for Shaft, a historically common event for Black people in New York.

• In the book, the character Ellie appears to be white, with light brown hair and gray blue eyes.  She's basically just a tryst who shows up in one scene.  In the film. Ellie is black and is definitely framed like she's Shaft's girlfriend which makes him kind of a dick when he picks up a woman at the No Name Bar.  Some of that girlfriend framing is because of the theme song which says 'no one understands him but his woman."  But still, the theme song is part of the whole text of the film.

• I thought this book passage was striking:

“There’s something funny going on . . . ” he said. The announcement did not amuse the Police Department. But it did not alarm the department at first. Blacks were free to move through the city so long as they remembered to shuffle. (p186)

• Also this one:

Shaft leaned off the curb and flagged three cabs before the driver of one would recognize his existence. Now that cops were moonlighting as armed cab drivers, it was almost possible for a black man to travel overland through New York. If his wardrobe passed the meticulous inspection of the cigar-stinking, unshaven ragbag behind the wheel. It was such a waste of energy being black. Emotional and physical. (p34)

• It's a little ambiguous but the narration gave me the impression that all the rough events in Shaft's past were withheld partially because he doesn't want to be defined by them and is trying to not think of them.

• There's a cool scene in the novel when Shaft is riding a taxi to Harlem to meet Buford.  It dips into both the driver and Shaft's point of view in quick succession.  The driver thinks this:

Relief in the cabbie’s voice. Maybe the spade would get out here. Maybe the black man would go away without robbing him and he could go back to hustling short hauls. (p60)

Which is a shitty thing to think.  And then Shaft thinks this about the driver's Jewishness:

He hadn’t liked them at all in any of those places or the way they had treated him or the way they had treated anyone else. They were the merchants of misery and the feeling would not leave him, (p61)

This is a neat bit of parallelism which serves as a bit of authorial condemnation for Shaft's own prejudices.  Up until this point I wasn't sure if Shaft's prejudices were also Tidyman's but this sealed for me that they weren't.  The cab driver's point of view followed immediately by Shaft's tells the reader "hey, this is what Shaft's bullshit sounds like coming from someone who does not benefit from protagonist bias."

• Maybe not surprisingly but film Shaft is kind of offended by Bumpy and how he's roughing up people in Harlem and getting Black people to shoot drugs in a way that he kind of isn't in the book.

• The scene I mentioned earlier where Shaft poses as a bartender has a nice touch in the book.  In both the novel and the film, Shaft offers the Mafia guys a free drink.  What is not present in the film is the detail that Shaft didn't charge them because he realized he didn't know what they had been charged for their earlier drinks and if he got it wrong it might tip them off that something was wrong with the new bartender.  It would have been really hard to convey this on film so the filmmakers didn't bother and it reads more like he's trying to get them drunk.

• I don't know if it's just an artifact of the ebook transfer I read but the book lacked blank space dividers between sections inside the chapters.  Before I figured that out it caused me a little bit of confusion as suddenly a character was talking who wasn't there before.  If there had been a visual divider I would have understood that we were changing scenes.  It's pervasive but not that confusing if you're aware of that quirk.

• The police Lieutenant's name is spelled Anderozzi in the book and Androzzi in the film.  I'm not sure why it was changed, but I've been using "Androzzi" when talking about the film character and "Anderozzi" when talking about the book character.

• This was a good passage in the novel:

He wondered, remembering the line from Lenny Bruce or Dick Gregory, if Johnson & Johnson would one day bring out black Band-Aids, for the twenty-five million other flesh tones. He answered his own speculation: no, they wouldn’t. (p128)

• This film exchange was interesting in light of the novel.

Androzzi

You know, you can get your rump in a sling for this mess. Static. A lot of hassle.

Shaft

You'll save me, Vic

Book Shaft probably wouldn't have said that; trust just comes too hard.

• At the very start of the film when Shaft is confidently striding through the streets near Time Square he just defiantly walks into traffic to cross the street.  He looked cool as hell but James and I worried for Roundtree's safety, as this was obviously not a controlled environment.  I chuckled pretty hard when at the equivalent scene at the very beginning of the novel, Shaft pointedly stops at a crosswalk and waits for the "Walk" signal.

Conclusion

I would highly recommend both Shaft the novel and Shaft the film.  Purely from a narrative perspective the book is probably "better" but the film is good and if you account for its importance and groundbreaking-ness, it's probably a wash overall.   I'd say experience both.

It really needs to be emphasized how big of a deal Shaft the film is.  I definitely did not do its impact and importance justice and there's so much more that could be said about it.  And I undoubtedly missed a lot in my viewing due to the temporal and cultural gaps between me, a white man living in Florida in 2026, and the milieu of the Black experience in 1970s New York.

Check them out.  This was a really rewarding journey for me.  To answer Isaac Hayes, I can in fact dig it.