Shaft's Big Score! (1972)

The difference between "Shaft" and "Shaft's Big Score" is that director Gordon Parks flaunts a bigger, beefer budget. Whereas the production values on the original "Shaft" seemed threadbare, "Shaft's Big Score" boasts a thick carpet piled with production values. Unmistakably, "Shaft's Big Score" is an impressively photographed epic with "The Seven Ups" lenser Urs Furrer teaming back up with Parks. Furrer creates eloquent visual compositions with his Panavision cameras, especially during an exciting car, boat, and helicopter chase. Nothing is claustrophobic about this spacious sequel. Okay, Issac Hayes doesn't reprise his role as composer. Instead, Parks performs double duty as composer with three songs for O.C. Smith that he penned the lyrics to so he could take up the slack wherever he could. The opening moments of this "Shaft" have been staged with considerable finesse. The cross-cutting between Shaft at the wheel of a car in route to meet with a close friend, Cal Asby (Robert Kya-Hill) and the friend pacing his insurance office is nicely done. Joseph Mascolo's mafia villain is not your usual thuggish type. He is an accomplished clarinet player who appreciates the finer things in life. Ernest Tidyman, who created the "Shaft" character, penned the sequel, and he doesn't retread the original. Crime boss Bumpy Jones (Moses Gunn of "Shaft") and his bodyguard Willy (Drew Bundini Brown) reappear here, too, but Captain Bollin (Julius W. Harris of "Live and Let Die") replaces Lieutenant Vic Androzzi (Charles Cioffi of "Shaft").Yes, there is a coffee gag reminiscent of the original where Shaft orders his coffee black from Bollin's subordinate Cooper. Naturally, when Cooper returns, he hands Shaft a coffee with cream and three sugars.A partner in a New York City numbers racket, Cal Asby, dies in an explosion and his partner John Kelly (Wally Taylor of "Rocky III") searches for the loot that Asby cleaned out of the safe. Meanwhile, the Mafia wants half of the action, and Kelly already owes mob boss Gus Mascola (Joseph Mascolo of "Jaws 2") a quarter of a million dollars. Kelly has a gambling debt that he owes Mascola, and Mascola wants to cut up the numbers racket that Asby and Kelly have. As it turns out, Cal Asby's half of the organization belongs to his younger sister, Arna Asby (Rosalind Miles of "The Black Six"), and she is in bed with private detective John Shaft when Asby calls Shaft at 2 AM and informs him that he has deposited $5-thousand in his bank account. Asby and Shaft are friends so when Ashby dies in the explosion, Captain Bollin wonders if Shaft hasn't gone over to the other side because he saw Shaft speaking with Bumpy and Willy after Asby's funeral. Bollin knows that Asby and Kelly are running numbers, but they haven't harassed their operation because it doesn't involve loan sharking, drugs, and prostitution. Meanwhile, Kelly learns from custodian, Jesse (Jimmy Hayeson) at the funeral home that Asby had a shopping bag with him before he died and he entered the casket display room where the models are arranged for customers to review. Shaft wants answers from Kelly, and Kelly asks that Gus take Shaft off his back. Shaft outsmarts a couple of Italian mobsters who call on him.Eventually, Gus and his men get to Shaft and rough him up behind a Mother Ike's night club. This entire scene is lensed in slow-motion. If turnabout is fair play, Shaft retaliates later when Willy and he masquerade as window washers and break into Gus's luxurious penthouse. Shaft beats up Gus, and Willy drops Pascal (Joe Santos of "Blue Thunder") with a bottle across the top of his head. Afterward, Gus tells Pascal to take the red peppers that he sent him out to fetch and use them as suppositories. Anyway, Kelly concludes that Asby must have stashed the loot in his coffin so he takes a crew out to the Oakland cemetery, and they exhume the casket. The Italians descend on the graveyard by helicopter. Gus gets every dollar bill from Kelly because Kelly owes him everything, and then Pascal's men riddle the lot of them with lead. By this time, Shaft has shown up, and he surprises the Italians, disarms them, and takes Gus as a hostage. Kelly's girlfriend, Rita (Kathy Imrie of "16 Blocks"), takes the wheel while Shaft slams Gus into the backseat. Pascal pursues them in a Dodge Charger for a lengthy, careening, high speed automobile chase. The Italians in the helicopter code-named 2-4 Whiskey hover over the scene, and a marksman with a sniper rifle takes potshots at them. Shaft returns fire with what appears to be an automatic shotgun. Shaft transfers Mascola to a speedboat and cuffs him to it. Finally, Mascola dies when the speedboat that Shaft stole hits an embankment and blows up. The helicopter continues its pursuit of Shaft through an old, abandoned factory building. Indeed, this chase looks like something out of either Alfred Hitchcock or James Bond. Shaft stashes the $250-thousand in the weeds and shoots Pascal and then takes out the helicopter."Shaft's Big Score" lives up to its title. The plot is complicated enough without being obtuse. The visual look and design are impeccable. This is such a polished piece of celluloid that it's difficult to believe that Parks and Furrer could exhibit such artistry. Several women appear nude from the waist up. Parks appears in a cameo in Mother Ike's night club. The scene at the elevator between Kelly and an elderly African-American lady is hilarious. Kelly complains about her use of the elevator, and she asks him where his f*&king manners are. The music is different and bolsters the savage action. Roundtree nails the Shaft persona again, and the rest of the cast is good, especially Joe Santos as Pascal. Parks doesn't wear out his welcome either as "Shaft's Big Score" clocks in at a 105 minutes. This is a vintage example of blaxploitation as its slickest.

In this second installment in the Shaft franchise, the film centers much more on mobsters than on John Shaft. It seems that $250,000 has disappeared and mobsters are threatening to kill an innocent widow to find the money. So, naturally, in steps Shaft to save the widow and out-muscle the mob.What was so great about the first film, SHAFT, was its "cool factor". Richard Roundtree was smart, handsome and always in control--a man other men would have wanted to be. However, here he's not in the film as much and he's less a Black hero and more just a hustler with way too much emphasis on action and not enough on brains and determination. The best example of this is the very silly ending. It's Shaft versus a ton of mobsters in cars and a helicopter--and Shaft manages to take out every crook AND knock down a helicopter with a shotgun. All the crooks had were pistols and a machine gun!!! They didn't stand a chance in this ridiculous finale.I was an enormous fan of the original SHAFT (1971) and because of that I was sure to seek out this sequel. Unfortunately, so much of what I loved in the original was gone and this turned out to be just another action picture. For example, the great tune "Shaft" by Isaac Hayes was gone and the music was rather bland. While still watchable, it's also rather brainless and forgettable--earning a 5. Sadly, the next film SHAFT IN Africa is even worse.

The enforced jollity of that exclamation mark should be a warning. 'Shaft's Big Score!', if I may say so under IMDb guidelines, must be the best 'bad' movie ever made. It is bad: supposedly an action film, direction, plot and action fell asleep as often as I did. But there is an intelligence and skill here unthinkable in, say, 'Police Academy IV'. If Shaft is Bond, than 'Shaft's Big Score' is an anti-Bond film, subjecting the hero to structuralist scrutiny, exposing his weaknesses and limitations; in one sex scene, site of his virile power, he dissolves into abstraction, his body disappearing from the place where it is most needed. A kind of ghost story, the funeral sequence is amazing, as a coffin is lowered down, but the camera rises and points at Shaft. This supernatural frisson is betrayed by the drive towards a risible helicopter climax.

It's a shame to see the Shaft series turning to self-parody so early in it's run, but after the low-key and surprisingly effective original this first sequel sees elements of mockery creeping into the format. Shaft, he of maroon leather trenchcoat and green rollneck, is now the ultimate supersleuth; a man who screws better than any other man, a man who fights better than any other man (he does get beaten in this film, but it takes three men to do it); a man who outwits any other man; a man who can outrun a helicopter and dodge machine-gun fire. This is a Shaft who does his detective work by hiding in coffins and posing as a window cleaner. And while he gets to sleep with the black girlfriend of one of the gangland bosses he opposes, he doesn't get to do the same to the white girlfriend of another criminal. Now that would have been groundbreaking.There's a moment early on where a gangland boss spends several moments playing a classical piece on an clarinet. The sequence runs for too long, not just for the film's style, but also the pacing. Which, in some incongruous kind of way, makes it a work of unique genius. Imagine Woody Allen playing a slow jazz number in the middle of "Boyz n the Hood" and you'll get the idea. Truly bizarre.The rest of the film's opening is like this: scenes are overlong and flabby, not possessing the required focus and dramatic effect. In fact, it's only until the last forty minutes or so that the movie really gets going. It's nice to see Tee-Hee from "Live and Let Die" (Julius W.Harris) as a police captain, though he fails to connect with Roundtree in the same way that Laurence Pressman did in the original.An increased budget is also evident: Shaft ends the film bedecked in black leather like a '68 Elvis comeback special, toting a machine-gun (as Prince would say). From hereon follows an increasingly silly chase sequence that sees a red Chevy/helicopter chase, then a speedboat/helicopter chase, and finally a Shaft/helicopter chase. Shaft takes on both chopper and rival car while on foot, limping from a bruised leg.Worst bit? Isaac Hayes, for some reason demoted in favour of the lesser O.C. Smith, only getting one mid-film song. Dreary and not of the high standard of Shaft's score (especially Soulsville), it drones on over a sex scene, shown through those curious 70s-style corrugated mirrors. The shot blends and obscures, twisting over the distorted reflections, producing in the viewer a dizzy sensation and making you feel sick.Best bit? A genteel pensioner, when spoken to rudely by Willy (Drew Bundini Brown), responding: "You don't talk to an old lady that way – where's your f****** manners, anyway?"If Big Score! lacks the pace and structure of it's former, then it is still an entertaining, if far-fetched, vehicle. Though its seeming need to create a black James Bond not through equality or empowerment, but via send-up, is worrying.