Even as The French Connection topped the Academy Awards ceremony beating out the likes of A Clockwork Orange and The Last Picture Show for top honors, an upstart composer named Isaac Hayes thrilled listeners with a raucous live performance of his theme from Shaft. Riffing on the rhetorical question "Can Ya Dig It?" Hayes gave a breath of lyrical life to one of 1971's most potent screen heroes and earned himself an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Grammy for his trouble.

Staked to the tagline "Hotter than Bond, Cooler than Bullitt" Shaft was released a few months after Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and helped usher in a new chapter for mainstream films. Blaxploitation was born and coined as a term typically used to describe the subsequent wave of Hollywood films that featured black performers although they were, more often than not, controlled by whites.

Its films were noted for inexpensive budgets and relatively high profits along with a reliance on black cultural signs including images from the criminal underworld, the inclusion of famous athletes and the representation of a usually ignored black middle class. The movement also demonstrated the changing nature of movie audiences in that its fan base was largely under the age of 30 and disproportionately formed by minority populations.

This realization meant the primarily black audience of a film was more central to its marketing and publicity considerations than any other influence. For many black actors, technicians and financiers alike the late 1960s and early '70s was therefore a time of unprecedented productivity that saw the opening up of mainstream filmmaking for the first time in history. The resulting films were almost totally formulaic but they employed black actors and actresses alike who spiced up the stories with their topical presence and unique talents heretofore unrecognized.

Gradually, though, black audiences grew tired of the new stereotypes offered by Blaxploitation regardless of its early promise to explode the limitations on blacks in mainstream movies. Tired clichés and offensive images went unsupported so the era of Blaxploitation came to an end in the mid to late '70s.

With black participation in Hollywood re-marginalized and the once struggling studios returning to dominance through new distribution formats, most notably that of videotape, the precedent of Blaxploitation changed the tone of mainstream American movies forever. For its central role in this changing landscape Shaft is owed more than a small debt of gratitude and provides a template for the overall movement some even call a genre unto itself.

Gordon Parks's film was released in the summer of 1971 and tells the story of John Shaft (Richard Roundtree), a Harlem based Black private detective with complicated ties to the NYPD. A crime lord named Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn) hires Shaft to find his kidnapped daughter but while conducting the investigation Shaft crosses paths with some black revolutionaries led by an old friend named Ben Buford (Christopher St. John). Despite their initial distrust, Buford and Shaft engineer the rescue of Jonas's daughter from her capture at the hands of white gangsters in conflict with Jonas.

Through his adventures Shaft enjoys several lovers and is wounded before finally saving the day. He also steps into the white world of police investigation through his friend Vic Androzzi (Charles Cioffi), a white NYPD captain who appreciates Shaft's courage but doesn't approve of his methods.

Included in this summary are all the elements of a financially lucrative film and the basic components of Blaxploitation's quickly exhausted formula. There's a charismatic lead actor, topical accommodation, sex and nudity, violence and well-crafted action, a pop soundtrack, a happy ending, confirmation of good triumphing over evil and a sense of humor. Thus Shaft was quickly copied before becoming a remarkable signpost of early '70s cultural history.

MGM produced the film in 1971 along with several other major box office disappointments like The Boy Friend, Wild Rovers and The Night Digger that very nearly bankrupted the studio. It was released in a pique of financial desperation and with extremely low expectations for financial, let alone artistic, success Shaft but it found an audience and turned a handsome profit. It so far out performed the expectations of MGM executives, in fact, that its gross of $7 million to $13 million on a shoe-string budget of some $500,000 to $1.5 million was seen as incomprehensible if for no other reason than the film was black oriented in subject and in tone.

Shaft was also a hit with critics. Most exclaimed their admiration for the film's courage in depicting a world of interesting, three-dimensional black characters all working through an effective plot. The film's focus on the black community was also seen as a breath of fresh air long needed since the beginning of Civil Rights agitation in the 1950s. Still, most critics were disturbed by the way all characters were embodiments of various white stereotypes of black behavior including the depiction of criminals, female subservience, male sexual virility and the misplaced revolutionary.

At a time when American movies were struggling with Vietnam, corruption in high government and rampant political confusion, it was considered a disappointment that Blaxploitation was only able to offer the same clichés found in older detective stories. Some critics even felt the film was technically mediocre and poorly acted, although something about the very presence of Shaft in the popular imagination escapes such critiques in the same way it's not useful to say Elvis Presley couldn't write a song when he's long been martyred as the King.

Regardless Shaft works hard to visualize black experience as never before possible from within white-dominated Hollywood. Importantly it is most successful when it concentrates on Shaft himself whose very identity is fully formed with an awareness of his race and the politics of the day. Where it is unsuccessful is in its characterization of this same hero as simultaneously independent and resourceful while also being sexist, violent and nominally criminal.

In the wake of its release and commercial success Shaft spawned two lesser-known sequels. Shaft's Big Score! was produced in 1972 with a budgets of nearly $2 million and managed to earn close to $4 million. The next year saw Shaft in Africa released with a $2.1 million budget but only $1.5 million in earnings. Richard Roundtree then starred in a season-long primetime TV series, although the show was not renewed after having lost the basic appeal of its sex play and violent action on the small screen.

For the generation of black filmmakers who entered the film industry in the wake of Blaxploitation but also of Spike Lee and Robert Townsend in the 1980s, there was a consistent body of foundational work from the '70s to inspire their efforts. With ready references in popular music, literature, television and movies to the black heroes of yore, Shaft foremost among them in having been re-introduced through Samuel L. Jackson's incarnation of 2000, Blaxploitation is at the center of black cultural production some 30 years after the movement was begun.

Of course it's important to recognize the active cultivation and participation of a loyal movie-going audience in the black community that was first recognized in the early 1970s. Otherwise the success of Blaxploitation would never have been achieved without the fiscal impetus to risk new screen subjects like racial sub-cultures for an attentive potential audience.

Still, the very real legacy of Shaft is in creating a viable, attractive and successful black male lead whose authority is never undercut by symbolic white masters. It doesn't hurt that Shaft is played by Richard Roundtree, then a model, who was very helpful in creating the embodiment of urban chic with leather jackets, black turtleneck sweaters and a certain stroll to his step while walking to the pulsing rhythm of Isaac Hayes's theme song.