Re-watching classic films is always a
fascinating experience for me. Rarely, if ever, did the people
making the movie know that they were making history. If it’s a
classic movie I’ve only seen a few times, as I have with Jaws,
I find myself hitting “play” with the unconscious expectation
that I’ll immediately be bombarded with classic scenes, only to
find myself seeing a story unfold in which those scenes are only a
tiny part.
The thing that struck me first with
Jaws was how it actually took a few moments for the classic
music to build up to the point at which most parodies start. The
build-up is what always seems to get lost in our collective memory,
even though that build-up is what elevated the movie to classic
status in the first place. The movie takes time to develop its three
leads, and even more time to turn them into a team.
In broad terms, the three in question
could be seen as the classic “Power Trio” of Kirk, Spock, and
McCoy. Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), the Oceanographer, is our
intellectual. Quint (Robert Shaw), the salty sea captain, is our
passionate and emotional member. Finally, Police Chief Martin Brody
(Roy Scheider) is the balancing point between the two and serves as
our protagonist.
That said however, the movie also
subverts expectations. Hooper can be extremely passionate, and he
and Quint are both miles ahead of Brody in their knowledge of the sea
and of sharks. Both also show off their extensive collections of
scars from run-ins with dangerous sea creatures while Brody looks on.
The two come into conflict mainly in terms of tactics. In short,
the film uses the broad strokes of archetypes as frames around which
to build complex characters.
If there really is someone out there
somewhere who hasn’t seen this movie, you need to. No pop culture
reference, plot summary or parody can capture what’s in this movie.
Tension builds to the point of eruption. It’s well-known now that
the decision to only rarely show the shark was made because of the
poor quality of the animatronics, but it works.
To describe this movie is to turn
what’s art in practice into tedium. We open on a teenaged girl
going for an evening swim, and promptly being pulled under the water.
When her body is discovered, the Mayor refuses to close the beaches,
even as Chief Brody recommends that he do so. There’s an attack
during the first swimming day of summer, forcing the mayor to give in
and close them for a brief twenty-four hours. A Tiger Shark is
captured, but Oceanographer Hooper notices that the bite-radius is
wrong. Unfortunately, Hooper’s tongue-lashing can’t convince the
Mayor to re-close the beaches. Another attack on the 4th
of July finally gives us a glimpse of the shark, and convinces the
three men to hunt it themselves in Fisherman Quint’s boat, which
makes up the final act of the film.
See how boring that sounds? In
practice though, every scene is necessary for the build up. The
shark is a threat that we’ve waited well over an hour for, and the
confrontation drags out for another forty minutes as the men struggle
to subdue a creature that can take pretty much anything that any
weapon they have on board is capable of dishing out, and eventually
of even sinking their boat. They’re up against a force of nature.
Gunshots are ignored, the decision for Hooper to dive in with a cage
to try to stab the shark in the mouth with a syringe of poison is an
act of utter desperation, and it eventually takes an exploding barrel
of compressed air to successfully end him. Only by the dumbest of
luck did the barrel land in the shark’s mouth at all.
Of course, this does bring me to one
question: Do I think this movie deserves its place perched high atop
this list? I can safely say that the top 3, Jaws, The Exorcist,
and Alien, are easily the winners in terms of sheer
universal terror. Numbers 4 and 5, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
and Psycho are both Masterpieces, well deserving of their
rankings. However, there’s something deep and profound in those
top 3, to the point that I literally cannot imagine anyone sitting
down to watch them and not being frightened.
Picking a true “winner” of those
three is like being asked to pick the best Da Vinci; kinda’
pointless when you’re dealing with such great work. That said
though, I personally would have put Alien on top, with Jaws
running a close second. (Yes, I know this seems to contradict my
Exorcist review, but my statement there concerned the biases
of others, not my own.)
It’s no coincidence that these three
films were made within a six-year period in the 1970s. It was a time
when creativity was successfully combined with mass-market appeal.
It was a time when studios tried to reign in the excesses of
directors while still respecting their talent. The only movies to
have come out in my lifetime which can even be considered in the same
category as these films are The Devil’s Rejects and Hard
Candy. I hope to see more of this type of film making within
before I die. And with the rise of new technology, the capacity is
certainly there. Sadly, much of our talent seems to choose meta over
sincere, and suspension of disbelief over believability.
And on that unrelated rant, I round off
this list. It’s been a long, hard slog, but well worth it.
