Pilgrimage

By JAY COCKS

Agent 007 has left a great many offspring in his wake. Two currently celebrated black superheroes share Bond's same consuming devotion to life-style and interracial violence. Although it might deal their identity a severe blow, both would have to acknowledge Bond as their spiritual father. They are less likely ever to bump into him, however, than into each other, for in their latest appearances they follow more or less the same route to Africa. There the harsh cynicism that was ground into them by the city streets suddenly evaporates. By returning to their roots, their pride is rekindled, their racial dignity renewed--and the scriptwriters have a fresh location and a little novelty to lard onto their stale adventures.

Shaft in Africa finds the priapic private investigator John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) on the trail of a ring of modern-day slave traders, who railroad unsuspecting blacks from Africa to Paris and put them to work at menial tasks for starvation wages. This sorry situation is brought to Shaft's attention in an unlikely manner: a large black fellow with a big stick chases the startled detective around his Greenwich Village apartment, brains him and bears him off to the suburban residence of an African diplomat, where he is tested, cajoled and finally hired to hunt down the slavers. It is not so much Shaft's social consciousness that responds to the African call, or even his continuing concern over his bank account. It seems that the diplomat has a daughter, Aleme (Vonetta McGee), who volunteers to administer a course in "native customs," which is all the sweetening that Shaft requires.

The head of the whole nasty slave racket is a Caucasian pervert named Amafi (Frank Finlay), whose line of chatter runs to things like "Luck can run out even for you, my black brother." It is difficult to imagine how he rose to such a position of prominence, but his henchmen seem impressed. They chase Shaft all over Ethiopia, from desert to village and even across the water to Paris. But he eventually dispatches them all, even taking time out to discuss a clitoridectomy with Aleme.

Superfly TNT is at least a shred more believable. It shows some flashes of hard wit and has a good, coarse sense of the criminal trades. Priest (Ron O'Neal), former street hustler and cocaine pusher, is now in residence in Rome with his fine woman (Sheila Frazier), living high but a little aimlessly. What finally gets him interested is the plight of a West African nation fighting for independence against a repressive colonial regime. In return for a leather pouch full of diamonds, and the chance to do a little something constructive for a change, Priest gets the rebels a large shipment of guns. Superfly rambles. But O'Neal, irreproachably cool as Priest, also directed, and provides several tough, inelegantly effective sequences. That puts him a couple up on Shaft. *Jay Cocks

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