Details

While the Black Power movement was reshaping America, trailblazing director Gordon Parks (The Learning Tree) made this groundbreaking blockbuster, which helped launch the blaxploitation era and gave the screen a new kind of badder-than-bad action hero in John Shaft (Embassy's Richard Roundtree, in a career-defining role), a streetwise New York City private eye who is as tough with criminals as he is tender with his lovers.

After Shaft is recruited to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a Harlem mob boss (Amazing Grace's Moses Gunn) from Italian gangsters, he finds himself in the middle of a rapidly escalating uptown vs. downtown turf war.

A vivid time capsule of seventies Manhattan in all its gritty glory that has inspired sequels and multimedia reboots galore, the original Shaft is studded with indelible elements-from Roundtree's sleek leather fashions to the iconic funk and soul score by Isaac Hayes.

Shaft is given the Criterion treatment and released on Blu-ray 27th June 2022 from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

Special Features

  • New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Alternate uncompressed stereo soundtrack remastered with creative input from Isaac Hayes III
  • Shaft's Big Score!, the 1972 follow-up to Shaft by director Gordon Parks
  • New documentary on the making of Shaft featuring curator Rhea L. Combs, film scholar Racquel J. Gates, filmmaker Nelson George, and music scholar Shana L. Redmond
  • Behind-the-scenes program featuring Parks, actor Richard Roundtree, and musician Isaac Hayes
  • Archival interviews with Hayes, Parks, and Roundtree
  • New interview with costume designer Joseph G. Aulisi
  • New program on the Black detective and the legacy of John Shaft, featuring scholar Kinohi Nishikawa and novelist Walter Mosley
  • A Complicated Man: The "Shaft" Legacy (2019)
  • Behind-the-scenes footage from Shaft's Big Score!
  • Trailers
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • An essay by film scholar Amy Abugo Ongiri