"Actor: Gwen Mitchell"

• Shaft 1-3: Shaft/Shaft's Big Score!/Shaft in Africa | Blu Ray | (27/07/2020) from £21.85   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  When Harlem P.I John Shaft first appeared on the movie scene, he was a 'shut your mouth' detective to reckon with, a fact underscored by Isaac Hayes' Oscar - winning Best Original Song (1971). Richard Roundtree plays the hard-hitting, street- smart title role, hunting for a kidnap victim in Shaft (1971) and seeking a friend's murderer in Shaft's Big Score! - mixing it up with mob thugs each time. Finally, there's Shaft in Africa, with our hero bringing down a slavery cartel. Shaft's the name. Excitement's the game! Special Features: Behind The Scenes Documentary Soul In Cinema: Filming Shaft On Location Shaft: The Killing (1973 TV Episode) Theatrical Trailers

• Shaft (1971) (Criterion Collection) UK Only | Blu Ray | (27/06/2022) from £25.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  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 elementsfrom Roundtree's sleek leather fashions to the iconic funk and soul score by ISAAC HAYES. Special Features New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack Alternate uncompressed stereo soundtrack remastered with creative input from Isaac Hayes III In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features 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 PLUS: An essay by film scholar Amy Abugo Ongiri

• Shaft | DVD | (05/03/2001) from £6.99   |  Saving you £7.00 (100.14%)   |  RRP £13.99

  This original and hippest version of Shaft cruised onto cinema screens in 1971. John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) is an African-American private eye who has a rocky relationship with cops, an even rockier one with Harlem gangsters, and a healthy sex life. The script finds Shaft tracking down the kidnapped daughter of a black mobster, but the pleasure of the film is the sum of its attitude, Roundtree's uncompromising performance, and the thrilling, Oscar-winning score by Isaac Hayes. Director Gordon Parks (The Learning Tree) seems fond of certain detective genre cliché (e.g., the hero walking into his low-rent office and finding a hood waiting to talk with him), but he and Roundtree make those moments their own. Shaft produced a couple of sequels, a follow-up television series, and a remake starring Samuel L Jackson, but none had the impact this movie did. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com

• Shaft Trilogy | DVD | (05/03/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £30.99

  The original and hippest version of Shaft cruised onto cinema screens in 1971. John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) is an African-American private eye who has a rocky relationship with cops, an even rockier one with Harlem gangsters, and a healthy sex life. The script finds Shaft tracking down the kidnapped daughter of a black mobster, but the pleasure of the film is the sum of its attitude, Roundtree's uncompromising performance, and the thrilling, Oscar-winning score by Isaac Hayes. Director Gordon Parks (The Learning Tree) seems fond of certain detective genre clichés (e.g., the hero walking into his low-rent office and finding a hood waiting to talk with him), but he and Roundtree make those moments their own. Shaft produced a couple of sequels, a follow-up television series, and a remake starring Samuel L. Jackson, but none had the impact this movie did. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com Shaft's Big Score is the first sequel to the super-hip 1971 original. When a pal of detective John Shaft is murdered in a bombing, New York's coolest private eye finds himself caught in the middle of a power struggle between black and white gangsters over the numbers racket in Queens. Directed by Gordon Parks (who does a brief cameo as a croupier in an illegal casino) and written by Ernest Tidyman (both of whom made the original Shaft), this film lacks the pacing of its progenitor. Roundtree is at his best when he's questioning a woman he's just met about a suspect while at the same time beguiling her into the sack (ah, those lazy, crazy days of the sexual revolution). The finale--a shootout in a cemetery, followed by a car-boat-helicopter chase through Queens and up the Harlem River--is preposterously drawn-out: Shaft, impervious to machine-gun fire, winds up tripping, spraining his ankle, and limping while running from the chopper; two shots later, he's sprinting like a halfback. Look for late Muhammad Ali trainer Drew Bundini Brown as a wise-cracking mobster. --Marshall Fine, Amazon.comShaft in Africa, the second sequel to the original hit, foreshadows itself early on when Shaft, asked to go undercover in Africa to halt a modern-day slave trade, claims that he's not James Bond but strictly Sam Spade. Bond, however, is the operative model here, with John Shaft masquerading as an Ethiopian to infiltrate the slave business and bring it down. Yet everyone he encounters seems to know who he is and wants to kill him--but the string of dead bodies he leaves in his wake across two continents proves that no one is able to stop everyone's favourite hip private eye. Written by Stirling Silliphant, the film is long on action set pieces that are filmed with more energy than the previous movie, Shaft's Big Score. Given contemporary practices involving smugglers of illegal Chinese and Mexican immigrants, the plot isn't all that far-fetched. Roundtree, as usual, is the picture of unflappable cool--but don't get him mad. --Marshall Fine, Amazon.com

• The Sherlock Holmes Catalogue - The Master Blackmailer | DVD | (28/04/2003) from £6.46   |  Saving you £3.53 (54.64%)   |  RRP £9.99

  The Master Blackmailer is a two-hour 1991 Granada TV adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's story The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton, which for the most part sticks close to the details of the original. Holmes (Jeremy Brett) takes on the reputed king of all blackmailers, Milverton (Robert Hardy), who has made a fortune extorting money from the famous and the blue-blooded and who routinely ruins others' lives when not pleased. Unable to talk Milverton into turning over letters belonging to Lady Eva Brackenwell, Holmes decides to steal them, going undercover as a plumber and even romancing Milverton's housemaid, Agatha (Sophie Thompson), to gain better access in the house. (The ethical Watson, played by Edward Hardwicke, is upset to hear of Holmes's deception of an innocent woman.) The story builds to a surprisingly violent finale, but the real hook is Brett's performance as the disguised detective and the startling suggestion that Holmes's close contact with Agatha truly moved the bachelor sleuth. --Tom Keogh