Anatomy of a Scene's Manatomy: Richard Roundtree is a Bad Mother... Shut Your Mouth... in 'Shaft in Africa'

<< Blog | Editorial Features Thursday, February 11, 4:00 PMThu, 11 Feb 2021 @ 4:00 PM by Jake Jizzenhall

Throughout cinema history, there have been some iconic nude scenes that have transcended the bounds of the films in which they appeared. Our weekly column Anatomy of a Scene's Manatomy will take an in-depth look at these scenes, their history, their deeper meanings, and their legacy. This Black History Month, we're saluting great nude scenes featuring actors of color, with everyone's favorite Bad Mother... shut your mouth... Richard Roundtree's bare ass fighting skills in Shaft in Africa!

While not the first "Blaxploitation" movie ever made, 1971's Shaft established the genre movement as a major player in the cinematic landscape of the 1970s. Winning an Oscar for Best Original Song and grossing $13 million against a budget of $500,000, Shaft was a cultural phenomenon that sent shockwaves through the entertainment industry. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit about the original film, however, is that in writer Ernest Tidyman's 1970 novel on which the film was based, the character of John Shaft was a white guy.

Director Gordon Parks, hot off the success of 1969's The Learning Tree, was hired to helm the adaptation of Tidyman's novel and it was his idea to cast male model turned stage actor Richard Roundtree in the lead role. While this may seem like a fairly revolutionary decision, particularly at the time, it wasn't Parks' intent to make Roundtree's casting any sort of statement. Rather, it was simply to give African-American audiences the chance to see a black hero in a populist film who won the day in the end, something that just wasn't happening in popular cinema at the time.

Of course, this act in and of itself proved revolutionary as black audiences were clearly hungry to see themselves represented on the screen as more than either a villain or a Sidney Poitier-esque saint. As we've seen over the last several years, representation in popular culture is everything when dealing with any group that isn't straight, white, and male. This is why the Blaxploitation movement exploded during this time immediately post-Civil Rights. Yes, films like In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner helped give black characters agency on film, but they were still mostly aimed at white audiences.

Shaft, along with Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, were films designed to play predominantly to the African-American market and that, most importantly, didn't even think to cater to a white audience's whims at all. True, Shaft was written by two white guys and features a pandering subplot wherein a Black Panthers type of group proves ineffective in their militant ways, but having a black director and black star at least helped to tip the balance away from that which would make white America comfortable. Shaft's massive success bore this out as well, kicking off the Blaxploitation movement in earnest and spawning a franchise in the bargain.

Roundtree and director Parks reunited the following year for Shaft's Big Score, another big hit that got a third film, Shaft in Africa, greenlit for the following summer. Parks left the franchise at this point, replaced by British journeyman director John Guillermin, who would helm a script written by Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night screenwriter Stirling Silliphant. As the title might suggest, the third film would take Shaft out of his familiar New York City home and drop him in Africa where he is tasked with busting up an illegal human trafficking ring.

While their intentions were certainly in the right place, it's not hard to see why Shaft in Africa spelled the death of the franchise for the better part of two decades. First of all, a white director and white writer were perhaps not the best people to oversee a film about the exploitation of lower class African citizens by upper class African citizens. A more common issue that plagued the film, however, was the move to more overtly politicize the actions of John Shaft. Rather than being a bad mother busting up mafia-related crimes in New York, he was now left to carry a heavy social burden on his back.

As mentioned earlier, Blaxploitation films played best when they were (mostly) message free action films that showed black protagonists triumphing over "the man." Shaft in Africa gets into the moral quagmire of black-on-black crime, rather than presenting an entertainment that allowed the black audience to escape from societal ills for two hours. The film also became one of the first Hollywood productions to shoot in Ethiopia, amongst other European countries, vastly inflating its budget over the previous two films. This perfect storm all led to the film's failure to recoup its reported $2.5 million budget upon its initial release.

To his credit, Richard Roundtree went the extra mile for his performance in Shaft in Africa, making his one and only nude appearance on screen as he finds himself locked in mortal combat while completely nude. Guillermin goes to some downright superhuman lengths to keep Roundtree's dick from appearing on screen, but we do get to spend two and a half minutes with his bare ass...

Of course, Shaft would bounce back in 2000 with a Samuel L. Jackson-fronted reboot, with Jackson, Roundtree, and Jessie T. Usher all teaming up 19 years after that for another entry in the franchise. The film is now synonymous with bad assery in its many forms, but it's interesting to see how far the franchise strayed from its roots in just under two years.

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Catch up with ALL of our other editions of Anatomy of a Scene's Manatomy...

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