Adam Wade

Shaft -- Gordon Parks' film features Isaac Hayes' classic theme song and Richard Roundtree as John Shaft, a black detective hired to find aHarlem mobster's beautiful kidnapped daughter.

A mischievous ghost tries to stop his widow from marrying a stuffy bore in this supernatural comedy. Widowed three years, Kay (Sally Field) still misses her Broadway choreographer husband, Jolly (James Caan), but she's ready to start anew by marrying Dr. Rupert Baines (Jeff Bridges). But her plans don't go smoothly; a week before the wedding, Jolly's spirit dances onto the scene and wreaks havoc by taunting Kay for loving such a stiff shirt.

'Hotter than Bond. Cooler than Bullitt,' movie posters proclaimed. John Shaft was indeed a shut-your-mouth detective to reckon with, a fact emphasized from the film's start by Isaac Hayes' Academy Award-winning Best Original Song and Oscar-nominated score. Richard Roundtree plays the smart, tough, confident lead, a private investigator whose hunt for a kidnapped woman puts him in the middle of feuding syndicates. Gordan Parks directs from a screenplay that Ernest Tidyman (that same year's Oscar-winner for The French Connection) co-scripted from his own novel. John Shaft is an icon of change from an era of change. Today, Shaft still tells it like it is.