Shaft occurs as 1971 blaxploitation film which tells the story of the detective, John Shaft, who travels across Harlem & to the Italian mob sequentially to buy the missing girl of a melanize gangster. It stars Richard Roundtree, Moses Gunn, Charles Cioffi, Christopher St. John, Gwenn Mitchell and Lawrence Pressman. A moving picture was adapted by Ernest Tidyman and John D.F. Black from the novel by Tidyman. It was directed by Gordon Parks.

Shaft's character embodied standard movie-detective coolness, however brought it to the freshly level by adding pronounced blackness. John Shaft was cool, caring, sexy, & delineate a nigrify point of learn from. Inside existence rational, really, & afrocentric, Shaft outclassed more melanize stereotypes in the film, including melanise urban junkies, black activists and black gangsters.

The important scene emphasized Shaft's afrocentrism, & involuntariness to assume racial hypocrisy: Lt. Androzzi (the detective) compares Shaft's skin tone to the blacken disposables Bic pen, saying "You're not so black." Shaft replies by holding higher the whiten ceramic coffee cup, asserting "you ain't so white either."

It won an Academy Award for Best Music, Song for Isaac Hayes for "Theme from Shaft". It was nominated for Best Music, Original Dramatic Score.

Both sequels were mass produced: ''Shaft's Big Score in 1972, and Shaft in Africa in 1973.

Within 2000, a sequel was manufactured featuring Samuel L. Jackson in the title role (see Shaft (2000 movie)''). Jackson plays a nephew of Richard Roundtree's character; Roundtree makes a cameo appearance.

Around 2000, the United States Library of Congress deemed the original film "culturally significant" & selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.