Video Store Rental Reviews #8: Shaft (1971), Prince of the City (1981), The Adventures of Ford Fairlane (1990)
DVD reviews in the year 2024.
Netflix holds roughly 6,500 titles.
Max and Peacock are about the same.
Hulu has a bit more, at just over 7,000.
My local video store has over 31,000 distinct titles that don’t disappear at the end of every month.
Here are reviews for three of them:
Shaft (1971)
Cool black private eye John Shaft is hired by a crime lord to find and retrieve his kidnapped daughter.
section: Gordon Parks
I've tried to ignore my curatorial impulses to theme entries of this column. Sure, in October I only talked about scary movies, but that's what we do on this site every Halloween. Otherwise, I created this series so I could specifically talk about whatever I wanted, randomly selecting a list of titles as if I were roaming the shelves of my video store. Anybody who knows me knows that I could never be that impulsive, often going into the store with my movies already picked out on a private Letterboxd list, but I like to browse after I've grabbed everything to get ideas for next time.
But as I tend to do, I watch one thing and like it, then I fall into those moods. In this case, I ended up watching detective movie after detective movie, finding the necessary forward momentum of the plots to be appealing and comforting - and it often means that the screenplay will at least have good bones.
My first encounter with Shaft was in my seventh-grade jazz band. Yeah, Mr. Tuck was a pretty cool dude, steering away from the usual "When the Saints Go Marching In" and pointing us toward '70s blaxploitation themes. (Mr. Midkiff, our orchestra teacher, did the same, having us play the Halo theme and a song by Coldplay - you know the one - at our recitals.) I'm pretty sure Mr. Tuck told a bunch of twelve-year-old white kids to watch Shaft, which is awesome, but I never did until now.
Criterion's 4K disc looks fantastic and is filled with so many extras, that you actually get another movie, Shaft's Big Score!. Director Gordon Parks, in his breakout movie, gives us a private dick with plenty of emphasis on the dick (and every euphemism for it), but I also appreciate that he never loses the mystery along the way. It would be really easy to let plot become secondary to all the cool cat stuff, but it turns out all those sweaty, sexy vibes are just what make it an all-time detective film. Crime novelist and genre icon Max Allan Collins even placed it on his recent list of the Top 10 Private Eye Movies, praising the realness even in the silly situations.
Prince of the City (1981)
New York City detective Daniel Ciello agrees to help the United States Department of Justice help eliminate corruption in the police department, as long as he will not have to turn in any close friends. In doing so, Ciello uncovers a conspiracy within the force to smuggle drugs to street informants.
section: Sidney Lumet
I've also been on a big Sidney Lumet kick recently (I wrote about both Before the Devils Knows You're Dead and Serpico recently, and it was a happy coincidence that The Big Picture just did a Lumet centennial retrospective) and although Prince of the City is much more about corruption than it is about detective work, I make the rules around here.
Treat Williams is such an interesting actor. I've highlighted a few of his performances in the past year, from the television production of A Streetcar Named Desire to the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Hair, and he's got this natural charisma in both that keeps his easily unlikable characters still likable. The same is true of Daniel Ciello in this film. He's just about everything I don't like in a person in one way or another, but I like Treat so it works. It's a shame his career went so sideways when his addiction got the better of him. I don't think he ever got that role.
This is sort of a Serpico riff and if I'm being honest, I'm gonna reach for that movie every time. More digestible runtime, Pacino, and I think it works better thematically. But it’s still great because it’s Lumet!
The Adventures of Ford Fairlane (1990)
To the Los Angeles elite, Ford Fairlane is known as “Mr. Rock ’n’ Roll Detective.” This loudmouthed ladies’ man serves an exclusive rock star clientele, who depend on his keen eye and smug discretion. So when a heavy-metal musician dies mid-concert, Fairlane is on the case before the lights come up. But things turn shocking when radio personality Johnny Crunch hires Fairlane to find a missing groupie mere hours before he is electrocuted live on air.
section: comedy
I found this movie through more unconventional means: a museum!
When Taylor and I visited Poster House this summer to see the Dawn Baillie exhibit (which Taylor wrote about more in-depth, and might I say excellently, here), I was struck by this specific poster for a movie I had never heard of called The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, which said the movie might be offensive to "men, women...black people, white people... pro-lifers, pro-choicers, pro bowlers..." I was immediately hooked! (That's what good movie posters do!)
Turns out it's just offensive to anyone with taste. Zing!
That's really not true at all and totally combative - the joke was just right there and I had to take it...
No, I actually want to defend this movie a little bit - one that won the Razzie for Worst Picture. Andrew Dice Clay's shtick and persona were pretty well worn out by the time I was of movie-watching age, so I don't have much of a history with him or his work. So I'm left with the movie itself: Clay plays Fairlane, a rock n' roll detective, who is pretty much an asshole to everybody, the villain is played by Wayne Newton (Roanoke, Virginia represent!), and it's directed by Renny Harlin. It's got all the pieces. Do all those pieces add up to make this noir parody work? I'm not sure yet, it's probably a little too 1990 Andrew Dice Clay (many of these jokes are pretty dated and hacky), but I was able to divorce it from that more than most.
Credit: Each plot synopsis from Letterboxd via TMDb.
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