Shaft

This is a guy that takes the law in his own hands and also has the community and his fellow cops for backup. He is a man that puts his respect for the badge to the innocent and cleans up the streets from the bad citizens of the city.

I feel race shows a positive point of view and a negative point of view in this film. Reason behind that is because he has leverage on the Sergeant Tom Hannon with knowing information about certain situations. The Sergeant on other hand gets Shaft out of sticky situations with the incident of a man falling out of his office building's window. To me, it's a "I'll help you out, you help me out "relationship". An example of the scene where the Sergeant puts the pen to Shafts face and said your not that black enough while Shaft put the coffee mug to the Sergeant's face and said your to white either. That shows a positive side of having different racial sides but in a joking matter. A negative side of this is the mobster in the coffee shop asking Shaft himself, if he seen some "nigger" named Shaft while Shaft quickly replied, " Your looking at him Whop!". In this movie, the director Gordon Parks shows the different cultures of people and the way they present themselves to others.

The beginning of the movie for me was surprisingly good. To me its been something that was show just then and now when Shaft started walking up from the subway stairs. It felt the director just portrayed Shaft as a normal human being just walking down in the city. Even with the music playing, they just showed Shaft being polite and greeting people as he was walking by. Also another reason why the intro was unique to me is because it was real time. My meaning ( on a side note is I don't know much about film.) that Gordon Parks just rolled the camera while the city of New York was just doing what New York does on a daily basis. The crowds, the cabs, everything was taken on camera with regular people just going to work, cabs transporting people and shops open for business. It's like the scene was already set and all you needed was the actors and the camera to start shooting!