Richard Roundtree shone, despite ‘Shaft’s’ long shadow

It is so all there, in the first two minutes.

Manhattan, 1971. Noise. Grime. The mean streets two years before Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets.”

Isaac Hayes’ “Theme from Shaft” — still the greatest-ever Oscar-winning song, just ahead of “Thanks for the Memory” — strides in underneath the “Shaft” opening credits sequence at the 30-second mark, as the camera glides by a grindhouse marquee advertising “The Wild Females.” He hasn’t even made his entrance yet, and they’re already lining up for him? Damn right.

Then, up from the subway, there he is, in leather and a turtleneck, cutting across a sea of sedans heading downtown. “Up yours!” says the private eye whose resume will forever lead with the lyric “sex machine to all the chicks.” Two years earlier, Ratso Rizzo in “Midnight Cowboy” came up with “I’m walkin’ here!” in a similar situation. Confronted by what you can only assume is the same pushy driver, John Shaft needs only two words (“Up yours!”) and one finger to handle the man.

Two minutes into the opening credits, Richard Roundtree was a star.

Roundtree died Oct. 24, at the age of 81, from pancreatic cancer. He never quite shook the memory, and the long, confining shadow of “Shaft,” its sequels, the short-lived, sanitized 1973 TV series, the reboots.

“Twenty-four-seven, there’s always some mention of that character,” Roundtree acknowledged on the red carpet of the 2011 Turner Classic Movies film festival. “Shaft” screened in the festival that year.

But in that historical context, Roundtree said, seeing it again was “a wonderful thing.”

Another might have come before him in the history of Black action stars. Maybe it was Woody Strode of “Spartacus” and “Sergeant Rutledge.” Maybe it was the first bona fide Black box office force, Sidney Poitier, not really an action star until later. Some might vote for Jim Brown, whose appearances in “The Dirty Dozen,” “100 Rifles” and others predated Roundtree’s film career.

It was Roundtree’s egregiously under-compensated starring role in “Shaft” that made that history. (He was paid $12,500 or $13,500; reports vary.) Produced on a low budget, with actual Black talent behind the camera as well as in front of it, director Gordon Parks’ movie helped save MGM’s financial skin that year.

The year before, the success of “Cotton Comes to Harlem” suggested that Black and some white audiences would turn out for a crime story centered around a Black figure of authority, navigating a world not geared to their autonomy and advancement. “Shaft” put the exclamation point on it all, while letting Shaft take care of the mob, the naysayers and obstacles, while lining up a series of ladies for his enjoyment and, a little later, his dismissal. The movie’s a tangle of contradictions, misogyny, contrivances and all. The world needed it right about then.

Born in New Rochelle, N.Y., in 1942, Roundtree arrived at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Ill., on a football scholarship in 1961. Carbondale wasn’t easy. A decade later, Roundtree told a New York Times feature writer: “My first day at Southern Illinois I had a $5 bill and went into a store to have it changed. I said, ‘Could I have …’ and they said, ‘No!’ They didn’t even know what I wanted. We had to cut our own hair, and we got called (racial epithets) by whites on the other teams.” He left midway through his second year.

He had other reasons to move on: He’d been scouted by Ebony Fashion Fair founder Eunice W. Johnson, and joined the touring Ebony Fashion Fair as a model, where the job was to make the clothes look their very, very best. He was very, very good at his job.

And then he became an actor. He joined the off-Broadway Negro Ensemble Company, eventually playing boxer Jack Johnson in “The Great White Hope.” (James Earl Jones portrayed Johnson on Broadway.) Roundtree started figuring out the performance distinctions between modeling and acting.

Later, he said he knew so little about filmmaking and acting for the camera that when director Parks cast him as Shaft, he didn’t really get comfortable with the role and the production until it was nearly finished. Audiences didn’t notice.

The year after “Shaft,” Roundtree and James Brown, among others, were honored guests at the Bud Billiken Parade in Chicago. “This year,” the Tribune wrote, “the children will have a special treat when Richard Roundtree, the now-famous superstar of the movie ‘Shaft,’ will appear at the Washington Park picnic.” Yes, and the adults, too!

In New York, on the set of the 1972 sequel “Shaft’s Big Score!,” Roundtree answered a visiting Tribune reporter’s question about what’ll become of all these so-called “blaxploitation” movies in vogue.

Yes, he averred, “it’s exploitation of the market. I guess the strongest will survive.”

And he did, a long time, though the business didn’t make it easy. He found a handful of non-Shaft roles in the ’70s to test his abilities, but the material cooperated only fitfully. My first encounter with him on the screen was in the 1974 “Earthquake,” where he played a nice-guy Black variation on motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel. Not much; a paycheck. But in the earthquake vs. humans smackdown, in Sensurround, people rooted for Roundtree’s survival, which meant he was doing something right.

A singularly strange chamber Western from around the same time, “Charley One-Eye,” handed Roundtree the starring role of a Civil War deserter listed in the credits only as the Black Man (!), opposite the Indian (!), played by Roy Thinnes. “Black man and red man crossing a desert of fear … but can they outrun a white man’s hate?” That’s how the trailer sold it. Gene Siskel didn’t love it but he praised Roundtree’s growth as an actor under the circumstances.

In recent years, following a recovery from breast cancer, Roundtree managed to get Shaft legend behind him long enough to play different sorts of men. He did four episodes of “Chicago Fire” in 2015. In 2019, he played Taraji P. Henson’s wise and mellow father in “What Men Want.” He worked until very near the end; his pancreatic cancer diagnosis came just two months ago.

Few screen actors find themselves in one pop-cultural landmark of a given decade. Roundtree managed two: first with “Shaft,” then in a supporting role in the 1977 ABC-TV miniseries “Roots.” If MGM had its way, Shaft — created by novelist Ernest Tidyman, who co-wrote the 1971 screenplay — would’ve gone to a white actor. And history would not have been made. In the documentary “Half Past Autumn,” director Parks said he wanted to create for Black audiences “a hero they hadn’t had before.” I love his phrasing on what he said next. Shaft, he said, was meant to “appeal to a Black urban audience, along with contiguous white youths.”

Hayes’ theme took care of the funk and the soul. Roundtree took care of the cool, always, right up until his own final credits.

“I am what I am,” he told the New York Times reporter, after “Shaft” came out and changed his career — but not, Roundtree insisted, the man whose career it was. “And I’m gonna be that way until the day when they put the number on my stone.”