Richard Roundtree wears an unidentified watch

"Who's the Black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks?" Isaac Hayes answered his own question, and the Academy gave him an Oscar for it. Gordon Parks directed the 1971 original Shaft, and Richard Roundtree played a kind of detective who hadn't existed on screen before — a Black private eye operating in Manhattan on his own terms, working both sides of the line between Harlem's crime bosses and the NYPD without belonging to either. Moses Gunn's Bumpy Jonas hires Shaft to find his kidnapped daughter, and the plot is simple because the character is the point.

The featured image is a promotional still, and while a steel watch is noted in the records, it is not clearly visible. Shaft's wardrobe is about self-possession, not flash — the leather coat, the turtleneck, the way Roundtree carries himself through midtown traffic. Whatever is on his wrist, it would not be expensive or showy. Shaft is a man who does not need accessories to get attention.