Word: shaft
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...SHAFT'S BIG SCORE brings back the black private eye who divides his time almost equally between brawls and bedrooms. Here, one of Shaft's fillies has a brother mixed up in the numbers racket. When the brother's storefront insurance office is bombed, the police find his body in the debris but no trace of the $250,000 that he and his partner had stashed in the company safe. Shaft starts to track the money down, a process that eventually involves him with some shady types from Downtown, some anxious cops and a bevy of slinky...
COME BACK, CHARLESTON BLUE features two of Shaft's soul brothers, a pair of Harlem plainclothesmen named Grave Digger Jones (Godfrey Cambridge) and Coffin Ed Johnson (Raymond St. Jacques) who made their movie debut in the casual, sometimes chaotic comedy thriller Cotton Comes to Harlem (1969). In Charleston Blue, Director Mark Warren shows a boisterous if somewhat blatant sense of fun as well as a knack for dealing with mayhem. Charleston Blue is like slaphappy and violent vaudeville. Under the guise of cleaning up the ghetto, a flashy fashion photographer called Painter is rerouting all the Mafia...
...cable car was hurled like a giant cannonball from the No. 2 mine shaft of the Wankie Colliery in northwestern Rhodesia, burning a row of papaya trees before it came to rest 50 yds. away. That was the first sign of the disaster. An explosion, possibly emanating from a dynamite magazine, had devastated the major shaft of the mine that produced all of Rhodesia's coal. On or near the surface, four men were killed instantly. Hundreds of feet below, 426 miners -390 of them black, 36 white-were trapped amid rock and deadly methane and carbon monoxide fumes...
...hours, rescue operations were tragically hampered by gases seeping from the minehead. Police urged a crowd of moaning African women to move out of range. Eventually the officers of the colliery, which is owned by the AngloAmerican Corp. of South Africa, decided to clear the shaft by pumping air in to push the fumes deeper into the mine; the decision permitted the rescue effort to begin but inevitably reduced the chance of finding anyone alive...
...show, as on its more successful rivals, still seems secondary to show business, and the hard facts of the day are even more shocking after the fun and games. WNBC-TV has ultra-glossy sets designed by Robin Wagner, designer of Jesus Christ Superstar, and theme music from Shaft. It is effective, but is it journalism...