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00:00 Richard Rowntree, the trailblazing actor who starred as the ultra-smooth private detective in several shaft films beginning in the early 1970s, has sadly died.
00:10 He was 81 years old, the shaft film of 1971 of course being the defining moment.
00:17 Rowntree's long-time manager Patrick McMinn said the actor had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and passed away at his home in Los Angeles.
00:24 Well let's get a sense of Richard Rowntree, the man, his movies and his legacy. We're joined by Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University.
00:34 Mark Anthony, thank you so much for being with us. How important in your view was Richard Rowntree's portrayal of the detective John Shaft?
00:41 You know in the years before the Marvel movies, before anyone knew who Black Panther was, or the Black Panthers for that matter,
00:49 John Shaft, the character in the Shaft movies, was a Black superhero. Someone who was larger than life, who kind of brought together the superhero image of a Malcolm X in the Black Panthers politically,
01:00 and also this kind of, you know, bad man, you know, that was willing to put white supremacy down and was a race man, and I did, he was supporting African Americans.
01:11 And the combination of that image, that swagger if you will, and the musical soundtrack from Isaac Hayes, you know, the theme from Shaft, that opening segment when Shaft is walking across the city,
01:24 and you hear that sound from Isaac Hayes coming through, it made him an icon. Really an icon for what I would describe as an alpha, hyper Black masculinity in the 1970s.
01:36 Shaft released then in 1971 if I'm not mistaken. Do you feel it's still as cutting edge, as relevant today in 2023? It was a remarkable movie of the time. Do you feel it still has that edge today?
01:49 I think it does, and I think a lot of that has to do with the soundtrack, and I give Richard Rowntree a lot of credit. There are ways in which he could have been typecast for the rest of his career playing these kind of roles.
02:00 He did several Shaft movies, he did other action-oriented movies, but he maintained his career for another 50 years, the last 25 of which almost exclusively on the small screen in terms of television.
02:12 I always look at him as someone who was comfortable enough in the Shaft role and in his own talent that he could go on and do other important things.
02:21 He did a cameo in a television series here in the U.S. called Rock, in which he played the uncle of the main character who was an out homosexual in the early 1990s when there were very few Black homosexuals on mainstream television.
02:34 He was comfortable enough in who he was as Richard Rowntree to take on that role, as he was comfortable enough 30 years ago to acknowledge that he was a survivor of breast cancer at a time when many folks didn't know that men got breast cancer, and surely we didn't think of Black men as having breast cancer.
02:52 So I think he was an important figure not just for that singular role, but for the presence that he had as a kind of version of Black masculinity that was sustainable over a 50-year career.
03:02 I recall trying to explain to my children watching a film called George of the Jungle in which Richard Rowntree played one of the supporting characters, just who that guy was, just how important he was and how cool he was.
03:17 It wasn't perhaps as apparent in George of the Jungle, but anybody who watches Shaft, and as you say, that opening sequence is really taken right into an era and a place and a moment that he really summed up.
03:29 Do you think that other people – and I'm taking this from my own perspective now because I feel that seeing Richard Rowntree, what I did as a child, and seeing, for instance, the Brazilian footballer Pelé play as a child, got rid for me some kind of preconceptions that I might have received from other people being brought up in a predominantly white city about Black people.
03:50 Do you think that in some way that he's helped with that?
03:54 I think absolutely. For white Americans who were unfamiliar with seeing Black men who weren't kind of shuffling comic characters, and for international audiences, because this is a film, the soundtrack and the movie obviously becomes an international hit also, it gives a sense of who Black Americans were, particularly Black American men, at a time when there were so many other different and negative images of what Black men were.
04:19 Marc-Anthony Neal, we often talk about some of the bad things that go on in the United States, you and I. You've been on this channel a number of times and your contribution is always welcome. Tell us what you think, maybe in the context of what I've just said, what will Richard Rowntree's legacy be?
04:34 He was an image of a Black man who had style, who had swagger, who was cool, and he maintained that throughout his 50-year career. He aged so gracefully in the person that—in who he was and the person that he was on the screen.
04:53 You still saw the hint of that swagger, you know, as an 80-year-old man, just the same way you saw it when he was a 30-year-old man playing John Shaft.
05:04 Marc-Anthony, let's hope we can both and we can all continue to liberate our inner Shaft and become better people. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed.
05:13 You're welcome. Thank you for having me.
05:14 Marc-Anthony Neil there, remembering the late, great, certainly great Richard Rowntree, famous of course for playing the detective John Shaft in the movie called Shaft.
05:24 Of course, a film which would be eternal because of the amazing soundtrack by Isaac Hayes, which I recommend you take a listen to and you take a look at. Absolutely wonderful stuff indeed.
05:33 Thanks again to our guest, Marc-Anthony Neil.