Word: shafting
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...produced Shaft films are illustrative. John Shaft, a black private detective who enforces the laws that repress much of the black community, is rewarded for his efforts with a fabulous penthouse, beautiful women, and lots of money. Serious black activists who are desperately trying to help the community, however, are portrayed as brash and fumbling idiots who live in coldwater walk-up tenements. The message is clear: be a self-centered hustler and maybe one day you can move to Park Avenue: deal seriously with the struggle for liberation and you are condemned to the ghetto...
...title character in Melinda is a black whore for a white gangster. The women in Super Fly are all prestitutes mindlessly devoted to the drug supplier, while in Cotton Comes to Harlem and Charlston Blue, black women are portrayed as naive, frivolous, or insane. The women in the Shaft films are merely repositories for the super-stud's semen. And as if there aren't enough real monsters to contend with in the ghetto, the king of horror films. American International, has a top grosser in Blacula, a movie that features Shakespearian actor William Marshall as a black vampire...
...compounded, for a people who have starved for a self-image tend to over-identify with slick and flashy characterizations. This has horrifying consequences given the perverted characterizations promoted in black movies. This summer in Chicago, for example, three black youths who were strangers joined up after seeing Shaft's Big Score. Proclaiming themselves to be John Shaft, they pulled a foolhardy robbery that culminated in a dangerous high-speed chase through city street by Chicago police. Two were shot to death after their auto crashed...
Other black movies could begin to match the quality of Sounder, but the white movie producers and their black allies have other aspirations. American International already has Blackenstein under production, and there is talk of yet another Shaft film. White producers justify their efforts by the old rationalization, "We're only giving them what they want." But like heroin and cocaine, whites and some unscrupulous blacks are once again giving the black community what it wants but not what it needs...
Even according to the dismal standards established by predecessors like Cool Breeze, Super Fly seems remarkably exploitative and inept. Director Gordon Parks Jr. (his father is the photojournalist turned film maker who directed the two Shaft movies) cuts to a shot of the fancy grillwork on Priest's car whenever he does not know what else to do. Thus there is an abundance of grillwork shots. This is Parks' first feature, and some faults are customary under such circumstances. But Super Fly shows no evidence of perception, intelligence or sensitivity; there is only a kind of frivolous opportunism...