Synopsis
John “Goldie” Mickens (Max Julien) and his partner Slim (Richard Pryor) are ambushed by rival gunmen in a junkyard. Two white detectives (Dan Gordon and William Watson) arrive on the scene and debate whether to kill Goldie or arrest him. Six years later, Goldie is released from prison and returns to Oakland. He visits his mentor, the Blind Man (Paul Harris) who advises Goldie, “Pimpin’s big business. And it’s been goin on since the beginning of time. And it’s gonna continue straight ahead until somebody up there turns out the lights on this small planet. Can you dig it?”

Goldie catches up with an ex-girlfriend (Carol Speed), an “outlaw” turning tricks to pay the bills. She implores Goldie to manage her. Goldie’s militant brother (Roger Mosley) is a political organizer dedicated to running pimps and drug dealers out of the community, but Goldie notifies him that he has some things he wants to do. He gets himself cleaned up, buys some new clothes and decides, “to be the meanest mack who ever lived. They’re gonna be talkin about Goldie like they used to talk about Jesus!”

Rising to such success that he is awarded “Mack of the Year” honors at the annual Players Ball in Oakland, trouble arises when Goldie’s former employer Fatman (George Murdock) gets word of his protégé’s success. He demands Goldie come back to work for him. The vile detectives who busted Goldie are also intent at taking him down. To get out of the game with his life intact, Goldie turns to his brother for help.

Production history
Robert Poole was an ex-con who – according to legend – wrote a 40-page treatment for a movie idea he had on prison toilet paper. His story concerned an ex-con who returns to the streets to become the greatest pimp of all time. Titled Black Is Beautiful, Poole ultimately approached producer Harvey Bernhard with his idea. Fascinated with how a man could “control a bitch’s mind,” Bernhard hired a young filmmaker named Michael Campus, who had shot a few television documentaries for ABC, to direct.

Max Julien was the first actor Bernhard approached. Julien had written the screenplay for Cleopatra Jones and was looking to direct, but Bernhard gave him carte blanche to rewrite the script. Traveling to Oakland, Julien and Campus sought the help of the Ward brothers, four men who ran the city’s criminal underworld. Frank Ward agreed to take the filmmakers into his world, if they took him into theirs. In addition to being awarded a cameo in the film, Ward inspired the basis for Goldie’s character.

Frank Ward not only met with Julien to make sure the actor portrayed him correctly, but provided protection for the cast and crew. Trouble came when Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party – who ran the political side of black Oakland – felt the production had infringed on their turf. The Panthers rained bottles down on the crew on the first day of filming. Julien was friends with Newton and met with him to cool tensions, but before filming could be completed, Frank Ward was shot in the back of the head and killed.

The Panthers were blamed for the hit and without Ward’s protection, the filmmakers retreated to L.A. to finish the film. They dedicated The Mack to Frank Ward, but as if to show who really ran Oakland, Huey Newton insisted the premiere benefit the Panthers’ milk fund in the city. Critics decried the film as “Blaxploitation” at the time, but it’s since come to represent ‘70s style finer than perhaps any other movie. Scenes later showed up in True Romance and Friday, and informed Snoop Dogg’s entire career.

Opinion
Other than the clothes, the cars and the music – Willie Hutch wrote and performed nine classic tunes, including “I Choose You,” “Theme of The Mack” and “Brother’s Gonna Work It Out” – one reason The Mack has endured is the message at its core. The tension between those seeking self-sufficiency through political change and those pursuing criminal enterprise – tension in the Black community that plagued the production – is richly conveyed in the relationship between Roger Mosley and Max Julien’s very memorable characters.

The movie is still a shoot ‘em up straight from the pages of Iceberg Slim and tends to get somewhat repetitive, but it also has an improvisational charge to its dialogue, thanks largely to Richard Pryor. Instead of feeling artificial, The Mack plays like a documentary feature on Oakland of the early ‘70s. And despite a comically low budget, nearly every scene is infused with a love for movies. Goldie’s makeover – where Julien throws dollar bills into the air and is captured in slow motion – is a joy.

Bill Gibron at DVD Verdict writes, “The Mack is indeed a neo-realistic, honest story of one man’s journey through the dark world of organized street crime. It is also incredibly preachy, disjointed, and esoterically insular … People seeing this film without a thorough knowledge and understanding of the jargon and manner of 1970s black society will probably find their head reeling from the excessive use of street jive and indecipherable pimp code names.”

“I see on the one hand a rather racist film filled with stereotypes and narrow attitudes, while on the other hand, Goldie maintains that a sense of empowerment and justice, however skewed, is served. A good argument for both stances could be made, but watching this film today, the blended themes are awkward and unnerving and bring back thoughts of how far we still have to go in terms of equality for everyone,” writes Ryan Cracknell at Apollo Movie Guide.

Jeffrey Anderson at Combustible Celluloid writes, “One of the seminal works of blaxploitation is actually a bit softer and more thoughtful than it may appear. This is partly thanks to the low-key, sleepy-eyed performance by Max Julien as ‘Goldie’ … The film is full of odd little touches, such as a man attacked by rats in the trunk of a car or battery acid injected into the veins of another. But in-between the (white) director Michael Campus employs an almost improvisatory approach, it’s as if the actors weren’t even aware the camera was running.”

Directed by Michael Schultz and written by Eric Monte, Cooley High was the first film to show black teens having fun and growing up like white kids had been doing in movies for years. Other than having an all-black cast and being released by American International Pictures in the mid-’70s, the film owes more to the comedy drama than it does a “Blaxploitation” flick.

The movie also sorta became the basis for the TV series What’s Happening!! After the pilot episode was poorly received, ABC retooled it completely, keeping the idea of a group of black high school buddies and a lead character who wore glasses (Preach/Rog) but nothing else. Fans of the sitcom will be disappointed to find no Rerun or roller boogie in the film version.

Monte, who also served as co-creator of Good Times, spent the ’70s fighting the networks and producers of Good Times, What’s Happening!!, and The Jeffersons – whose lead characters he created on an episode of All In The Family – accusing them of stealing his ideas without pay. He would be awarded $1 million in a court settlement, but ended up becoming addicted to crack and living in a Salvation Army shelter by 2003.

Cooley High has been compared to American Graffiti, and I guess if you replace Northern California with Chicago, white kids with black kids, and great cars with dudes too broke to drive running everywhere on foot, it is.

Mainly, there’s the problem of Monte’s script. The writing is pretty rough and unsophisticated, with dialogue that lays there flat. It isn’t even very funny. Saturday Night Live’s Garret Morris, whose character steals the film as a sympathetic teacher, doesn’t even appear until over half way through the movie, and then makes a quick exit.

A lot of the acting – particularly by the attractive but wooden Cynthia Davis as Preach’s love interest – is amateur hour, though it is nice to see Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs played someone other than “Boom Boom” Washington on Welcome Back, Kotter. He and Turman are pretty good in the flick.

Something Monte’s screenplay did have going for it was heart, and that at least shines through. Cooley High does capture the black experience during a particular point in time in a way no other movie bothered to do. The soundtrack proliferates with Motown artists like The Supremes, Smokey Robinson and The Four Tops. It’s another respectable touch, but none of this film is on par with American Graffiti.

Isaac Hayes stars in this terrific American International Pictures drive-in flick as the title character, a football player turned bounty hunter.

Truck and his partner Jerry (Alan Weeks) are dispatched to bring an armed and dangerous pimp to jail. The pimp escapes by eventually running into a bar and throwing wads of cash at anyone who can beat up the “punks” getting ready to fly through the door. Truck and Jerry later find him, but when he reaches for his pistol, the skip tracers are forced to shoot the pimp dead.

This provokes a venomous madam played by Nichelle Nichols – Uhura from Star Trek – to offer up her stable of ladies to the sucka who can take Truck out. At the front of the line is Harvard Blue, a pimp played by Yaphet Kotto. Meanwhile, Truck has to handle a girlfriend (Annazette Chase) getting out of jail for petty larceny.

Directed by Jonathan Kaplan – who would go on to helm Heart Like A Wheel, The Accused and several other A-list studio dramas – from a script by Oscar Williams and Michael Allin, and from a story by Jerry Wilkes, Truck Turner is one of the best entries in the Blaxploitation genre.

For starters, AIP actually bought a script. The first half of the movie simply follows Truck around, as his girlfriend’s cat pees on his last “clean” shirt and he goes about his day. Truck and Jerry go to an army barracks to pick up a prisoner and run the barricade, hoping the MP shoots the bad tire Truck needs replacing.

Their prisoner starts yelling racial slurs, so we cut to Truck taking the cuffs off him and whopping his ass in a field (the punching sound effects in the movie are dynamite). Truck promises his girl he’ll pick her up from jail, and goofs around with Jerry in his new Dodge Charger. All of his before any real plot kicks in.

Once it does, the movie slows to a crawl. Kotto is not given much playing time as the bad guy, though it is amusing to hear Lt. Uhura spewing obscenities. Every moment Isaac Hayes is off screen, the movie suffers, which is ironic, because this would be the only film he would ever play a leading role in.

As an actor – even in ‘74 – Hayes knew his limitations. He doesn’t attempt any emoting and he doesn’t try to be a handsome leading man, but instead plays a working class dude having fun with his buddies, suffering his woman and putting a foot in the ass of anyone who messes with his day.

Even better, Hayes is funny. Truck Turner is really an action comedy. The scene where Truck picks Annazette Chase up from jail, a whole day late, but offers her a six pack of beer, is hilarious.

Sam Laws co-stars as the grizzled old bail bondsman Truck works for, while Scatman Crothers (when he still had hair), Dick Miller and Charles Cyphers pop up in bit parts that add a lot of flavor to the movie. Kaplan, who got on-the-job training from Roger Corman directing classics like Night Call Nurses and The Student Teachers, makes the film feel real by shooting on location in L.A. and incorporating lots of locals into the over-the-top action.

Hayes also supplied the musical score, which doesn’t measure up to his Academy Award winning work on Shaft, but is still pretty damn funky.

When a couple are blown up by a car bomb, their son, a retired Green Beret named Slaughter (Jim Brown) goes gunning for revenge. “The Man” gets Slaughter to agree to go to South America, and for reasons that defy logic, work for the FBI. Slaughter is paired with two agents (Don Gordon and Marlene Clark) and gets on the bad side of a hotheaded mafia chief (Rip Torn) by getting cozy with his woman (Stella Stevens).

Directed by Jack Starrett, from a script by Mark Hanna and Don Williams, this American International Pictures release is a bucket of dumb fun that benefits hugely from Brown’s screen presence and by Starrett’s energetic direction.

Starrett would next direct Cleopatra Jones and Ride With The Devil, and shows real flair as an action director, not only executing action sequences in anamorphic frame, but doing so with style. Several choice moments of beat down are purposely distorted, as if the Hulk were stretching the sides of the screen. For other moments, the film is undercranked, which can look cartoonish if done for too long, but Starrett’s flourishes give the movie a visual wit the script completely lacks.

There’s no script here, at least not one that makes any kind of sense. The plot involves the mob – for unexplained reasons (probably budget) are headquartered in South America – using a computer to store records. Slaughter’s father knew about the computer and was killed. Slaughter’s surveillance technique involves making himself a target for mafia hoods, whom he dispatches with a .45 one at a time. The dialogue is a flat tire and the characters behave in a way that defies explanation, even for a Blaxploitation flick.

Rip Torn is woefully under used as Mister Big. In his final scene, he admits to killing Slaughter’s parents and throws in a racial slur for good measure, before asking Brown to help him out of an overturned car. Not the most intelligent villain in the history of film. Naturally, he doesn’t make it.

On a positive note, the musical score by Luchi de Jesus is good, and Billy Preston provided the decent theme song. There is a stylish opening credits sequence that kicks things off on the right note as well. Between Brown’s ease playing a superhero, and Starrett’s ability to capture the action, Slaughter is fun enough to recommend. Jim Brown would return in the sequel, Slaughter’s Big Rip-off.

Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby were paired together again in this follow-up to Uptown Saturday Night, this time playing working class, married men from Atlanta (Poitier is a milkman, Cosby a factory worker). When their community lodge has to come up with cash to relocate, Cosby convinces Poitier to accompany him to New Orleans and to use his knack for hypnosis to fix a big boxing match.

Accompanied by their wives – the uptight Lee Chamberlain and soulful Denise Nicholas – Poitier & Cosby “put the whammy” on a boxer played by Jimmie Walker, transforming him from a chump into a he-man. The con nets a big payoff from rival gangsters (played supremely well by John Amos and Calvin Lockhart). But Amos tracks the pair down and forces them to return to New Orleans and put the whammy on the rematch. Poitier & Cosby decide instead to sting the gangsters, with a little help from their wives.

Directed by Sidney Poitier and written by Richard Wesley (from a story by Timothy March), Let’s Do It Again is perhaps the best buddy comedy of the era, and I’m including the Gene Wilder-Richard Pryor pictures and the Eddie Murphy comedies of the ’80s in that statement. There isn’t one scene that falls flat here. The movie works beautifully from beginning to end.

As the lead performer of an impressive ensemble, Poitier shows much greater comfort doing comedy than he did in Uptown. Instead of playing the straight man and deferring to Cosby, Poitier gives himself a lot more to do here, “putting the whammy” on people or impersonating a high rolling hustler, complete with pimp hat and cape.

Cosby once again runs away with the movie, delivering perhaps the best film work of his career. The well traveled setup is for Poitier & Cosby to be discovered someplace they’re not supposed to be, and Cosby’s character having to talk their way out.

Classic bits include Cosby imitating a hotel detective, before realizing the dude he’s trying to con is the real hotel detective, and a laugh-out-loud bit where Cosby, decked out in pimp Bermuda shorts, cap and wraparound shades, tries to play himself off to Amos as a high roller. Nothing could be further away from Heathcliff Huxtable than Cosby playing a super fly hustler, but he’s brilliant in the movie.

As director, Poitier not only delivers laughs, but cast his movie extremely well. In addition to Amos – who is great fun to watch get furious – Chamberlain & Nicholas play women with wit who get to strut their stuff as a part of the sting. Jimmie Walker – who on one hand, always wore on the nerves the more dialogue he was given – gets laughs just by appearing in boxing trunks. The scene where he comes out to spar with superhuman strength, launching a punching bag through a window, is hilarious.

Ossie Davis is well utilized as the elder of the lodge, amusingly named “The Sons and Daughters of Shaka.” Also of note is George Foreman, who pops up as a factory worker at the beginning of the film, heckling Cosby and radiating all the charm he would during his boxing comeback the following decade.

Curtis Mayfield, whose music for Super Fly ranks as one of the best soundtracks ever recorded for a movie, wrote and produced the sensational soul music here. Among nine tracks, The Staples Singers performed a classic theme song in “Let’ Do It Again” that captures the fun and flirtatious vibe of the movie. Highly recommended.

Sidney Poitier & Bill Cosby star as working class married men in Chicago (Poitier is an ironworker, Cosby a cabbie). Cosby convinces his straight pal Poitier to take a walk on the wilder side and accompany him to an upscale speakeasy. After Cosby bluffs their way inside, masked men rob the joint, stealing Poitier’s wallet, which he discovers the next day holds a winning $50,000 lottery ticket.

The working stiffs first approach a jumpy private eye (Richard Pryor, in a hilarious cameo) to help them, but after that fails, resort to conning rival gangsters “Geechie” Dan Beauford (Harry Belafonte, imitating Marlon Brando) and Silky Slim (Calvin Lockhart) in an effort to retrieve the wallet.

Directed by Sidney Poitier, from a screenplay by Richard Wesley, this was the first of three popular buddy comedies featuring Poitier & Cosby in the mid-’70s. Poitier wanted to answer critics who felt that his dignified screen persona – espousing upper middle class (re: white) values – had alienated urban audiences. When he began his directing, Poitier shifted to comedies, which proved extremely successful with both white and urban audiences.

Uptown Saturday Night is funny in spots, but is uneven, as if the filmmakers were unsure whether what they were trying was working from scene to scene. Poitier originally wanted to produce and direct, rather than also play a lead role, and his character acts the straight man, standing around and deferring too much to Cosby, who runs away with the picture.

Cosby does amazing work here, playing a bearded, working class cat with a cool rap. In a hilarious scene, Cosby marches into a bar and starts throwing his weight around, chasing a dude out with a barstool, before having to talk his way past a diminutive gangster (Harold Nicholas) with karate skills. The bit is even funnier than Eddie Murphy’s bar raising scene in 48 HRS. because Cosby has to play both a loudmouth and a chump in the same scene.

Other cast members don’t fare as well. Flip Wilson appears in two scenes as a preacher and brings absolutely nothing to the film. Rosalind Cash and Ketty Lester are woefully underwritten as the wives and have nothing to do here. In addition to Pryor’s great bit, Paula Kelly pops up as a two-fisted speakeasy patron and is dynamite, while Poitier & Cosby do work extremely well together. The film suffers greatly whenever they’re off screen.

Universal Pictures’ foray into the Blaxploitation genre stars Roscoe Orman as the title character, a Manhattan pimp whose ambition to shoot to the top of the game is gradually tempered by the efforts of a social worker (the late Diana Sands) and her D.A. boyfriend (Thalmus Rasulala).

Directed by Gilbert Moses, from a screen story by Ron Culter and Joe Keyes Jr. and a screenplay by Cutler, Willie Dynamite is like a hooker with a heart of gold. It has good intentions (Richard Zanuck and David Brown were actually the producers, many, many years before winning Oscars for Driving Miss Daisy) but it is still a mangy, banged up affair, a trifle when compared to its contemporaries.

The movie starts off reasonably savvy with Willie D.’s seven ladies of leisure parting a sea of Shriners massed at a hotel, employing capitalist savvy to get business as a Shriner gives a speech on free market enterprise in the background.

But upon the entrance of Orman – who would later assay the role of Gordon on Sesame Street (man, is it weird seeing him strut around in a pimp costume!) – the movie is aimless. The filmmakers seem genuinely confused over whether Willie D. is the hero of the film, or a bad guy that Sands must take down. He’s never nasty enough to want to see fall a la Tony Montana, or evil enough to despise as a heavy. With a little more effort, the movie might have worked as a comedy.

Willie D. is repeatedly harassed by the cops (his Cadillac El Dorado is either towed or confiscated throughout the movie) to almost comic effect, but there are long stretches of dialogue where Sands tries to educate the prostitutes to the errors of their ways, like an afterschool special. There are some chases and shootouts about half way through the picture, but by then, I could have cared less what calamity befell Willie D.

The intention here seemed to be to chronicle the wayward ways of a street hustler and show why he chooses to give up the game and go straight, something Super Fly was much more adept at dealing with, without pages and pages of anti-pimp dialogue. There is much too much talking in the movie and very little atmosphere to vibe on. The soundtrack by J.J. Johnson is entirely forgettable.

Cool as ice problem solver Mr. T (Robert Hooks) – who is equal parts private eye and neighborhood kingpin – is hired by two gangsters (Paul Winfield and Ralph Waite) to find out who’s been sticking up their craps games. The gangsters frame Mr. T for the shooting of a henchman belonging to a rival mobster, played by the terrific Julius Harris. Once Mr. T finds out he’s been set up, he goes gunning for revenge.

Directed by Ivan Dixon, who would next helm The Spook Who Sat By The Door before racking up credits in TV throughout the ’70s, and written by John D.F. Black, Trouble Man isn’t good enough to really recommend, but it’s not bad enough to blowtorch either.

With respectable financing by 20^th Century Fox – who must have intended this to be their answer to Shaft – the film is competently made, for the most part. The fight choreography is weak, but the casting of Hooks was a great move. He plays Mr. T with ice water in the veins, the perfect bad motherfucker you’d want to come see if you had some sort of problem in Los Angeles.

The film gets off to a smooth start, with Mr. T driving to his headquarters, a pool hall managed by a cat with a tin leg (a natural performance by Bill Henderson). Mr. T agrees to post bail for a knucklehead in jail, offers to look into an apartment building in disrepair and schools a hustler in a game of pool before being approached by Winfield and Waite, who are also quite good in the film.

The biggest problem with Trouble Man is the dialogue. Characters talk, and talk, and talk. Exposition and explanation go on for what seems like forever. The plot isn’t what you’d call complicated and required nowhere near as much banal dialogue as is present in the film.

Much of the movie plays like an afterthought, a project that was produced to complement Marvin Gaye’s masterful score. Made up mostly of instrumental pieces, the Trouble Man album is sublime in its cool, mostly unassuming and even quiet in spots, with a rich blues flavor. It was released between Gaye’s landmark “What’s Goin’ On” and “Let’s Get It On” LPs and captures the singer at the height of his legendary soul prowess.

It’s almost as if the filmmakers listened to Gaye’s score, watched Shaft and then slapped together a movie. It’s actually not bad, but not worth really watching either.

When a Black robbery crew knock over a collections bank in Harlem, killing three Blacks, two Italians and two cops, the NYPD’s 27^th Precinct assigns old school Capt. Frank Mattelli (Anthony Quinn, who also served as executive producer) to work with the up-and-coming Lt. Pope (Yaphet Kotto) to find the crew before the mob gets them first.

Across 110^th Street effectively pimp slaps every entry in the Blaxploitation genre, from Shaft to Coffy to my sentimental favorite, The Mack. It doesn’t aspire to be a drive-in flick – made for a dollar and making back two – but succeeds impressively as a strong film in every conceivable category, from screenplay, direction, performances, casting and production value.

Adapted by Luther Davis (a former writer for Bob Hope) from a novel by Wally Ferris, the well written story – while violent – eschews mayhem to focus on how a brazen robbery ripples through a community in a twenty-four hour period. Its effects are felt by the disparate robbery crew (Paul Benjamin, Ed Bernard, Antonio Fargas), the cops who investigate, the prostitutes pumped for information, the mob who struggle to retain control over Harlem and by the innocents caught in the crossfire.

The director was Barry Shear, who had one notable feature – the ’60s cult curio Wild In The Streets – to his credit, but had directed thousands of hours of TV, from Hawaii Five-O to Julia to Streets of San Francisco. The movie propels forward with impressive momentum, jumping from bars in Harlem to the 27^th Precinct to dingy tenements to the rooftops over New York. It doesn’t stop for needless exposition or backstory, but manages to give each member of the cast something memorable to do.

The film spends 40 minutes at most with the cops. As played terrifically by Quinn, Mattelli knows every nuance in Harlem. He respects the honest people, but doesn’t hesitate to brutalize the crooks. Kotto’s Lt. Pope is still learning when to go off book, without compromising his ethnics and ending up like the old man. Quinn and Kotto were actors who embodied old school/new school better than any that could have been cast at the time, and are terrific to watch work together.

Paul Benjamin, who would memorably play “corner man” M.L. in Do The Right Thing, stands out as the leader of the robbery crew, a thief with a soul who didn’t want to kill anybody, but isn’t going back to life as a janitor either. Anthony Franciosa almost steals the film as the mob boss’s prick son-in-law, known in Harlem as “a punk errand boy,” who is put in charge of finding the crew and tries to use the appointment to get respect.

Instead of making this a star vehicle for Quinn, the filmmakers instead document Harlem, including things like kids dropping water balloons on the beat cops at the crime scene, with the soaked cop’s partner telling him, “It’s all right, I think it’s just water.” The camera work by Jack Priestly and editing by Carl Pingitore are also first rate, whether following Quinn through a calamitous precinct house as he calms the nerves of the locals, or cutting from a thug being shoved down an elevator shaft to Benjamin’s character waking up in a cold sweat.

Bobby Womack provided the memorable theme song, though the version used for the opening credits of Jackie Brown was much funkier than the remix used here. One other highlight of the film is a scene in the 27^th Precinct basement, where criminal records are accessed in a 1940s-era filing cabinet and laughably outdated even by Pope’s standards in 1972.

The movie lacks any significant female characters. But instead of giving Quinn or Kotto a love interest or home life, this keeps the focus on Harlem and how the robbery’s ripple effect plays across its territory. It works as a character drama, an urban action flick and a social document of the times. If you give one flick in the Blaxploitation genre a gander, Across 110^th Street would definitely be it.

Final entry in MGM’s Shaft trilogy finds “the Black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks” (Richard Roundtree) selected by an African emir to go undercover and break the slavery ring victimizing his people.

Trained by the emir’s daughter (the alluring Vonetta McGee) in how to best use the native tongue, Shaft’s journey stretches from urban Abbis Ababa, across the Ethiopian savannah, over the Mediterranean and finally to Paris, where he locates and shuts down the big boss, a French slave trader (Frank Finlay).

Unlike Dirty Harry and most action franchises, the Shaft films would actually improve as the series went on. This installment was directed by John Guillermin, who displays his panache filling a Panavision frame with scenic action much the same way he would next in The Towering Inferno.

With a larger budget than either of the previous films, not only is the action of Shaft In Africa sharper, but the location scouts secure some breathtaking scenery, which the filmmakers wisely take the time to savor by having Shaft walk through Ethiopia for several sequences.

The decision to take Shaft off the streets of Harlem and send him out of his element brings a terrific energy that was missing from all but the first ten minutes of the original film. Shaft is not allowed to carry a gun when he starts his journey here, relying only on his mastery of stick fighting for protection, leading to a well choreographed duel in the middle of the film.

Stirling Silliphant wrote the screenplay and brought some much needed wit, one-liners and double entendres to the script without letting the franchise descend into a satire of itself. The women of the movie – McGee, and Neda Arneric, playing the oversexed, adventurous Serbian girlfriend of the big boss – actually have some interesting business here that is not limited to marveling at Shaft’s equipment.

Perhaps the most vital element of the Shaft movies is the music. Even without Isaac Hayes scoring either of the sequels, the soundtrack stayed consistently bad ass. Johnny Pate composed the music here, and The Four Tops performed a sensational title tune, “Are You Man Enough.” The result is an international flavored action film that is way, way better than most of the 007 movies of the decade.

The overseas shoot escalated the budget, which was unfortunately not earned back at the box office. MGM sold the series off to TV for a short-lived weekly show starring Roundtree. Pound for pound, this was one of the best trilogies Hollywood would ever produce.