JAWS (1975)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay: Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb based on the novel by Peter Benchley
The film that became the first ever and it in fact, invented the term “blockbuster,” as it was played in every theatre in every town. (Before then, most films were shown at one theater in a town.) I’ve been lucky enough to see it on the big screen and, “Jaws,” had to be seen by everyone. If you ever get a chance to see it on the big screen, go. It’s as great an action-adventure-horror film you’re ever going to see, and it’s also the first really great example of how good a director Steven Spielberg really is. Yes, there's some legendary aspects to Spielberg, and to "Jaws" in particular, his films are like him, bigger than life, but sometimes it's the small choices he makes that can really separate him from the rest. There’s a shot in the movie, that nobody thinks much about, involving a huge shark that one fisherman’s caught, and everyone thinks it’s the notorious shark that’s been terrorizing the beach. As the camera pans, Spielberg actually uses the shark, as a frame, and he frames Roy Schieder's face with the shark. Would you ever think of a shot like that? Schieder plays Brody, a local sheriff to the beachfront tourist area of Amity, who’s convinced that the shark should be caught, and that the beaches be empty until it is. A marine biologist, Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) thinks so as well. This is one of the first action movies where despite every warning imaginable, the guy in charge, in this case, a town mayor, Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) continually does the opposite, until it’s too late. Eventually, Hooper heads out along with an old sea-farer Quint (Robert Shaw), and hunt for the shark.
One of the keys to the movie that not everybody picks up on, is the exposition dialogue, most of it, from the Dreyfuss character, who’s strangely right to play this role. He was very young when he got this part, he had just done “American Graffiti,” about two years earlier, and here’s a character who’s basic objective in the role is to explain to us, just how vicious this shark can be. “I pulled out a tooth as big as a shot glass, and it was the tooth of a great white,” for instance, it’s very vivid dialogue that in a bad actor’s hand could be heavily overacted. Dreyfuss looks like he fell off the Volkswagon bus from Berkeley, but he speaks matter-of-factly and urgently, like an expert does. It’s this dialogue, and the way it’s delivered, that set up the movie’s most famous line of dialogue. We remember Brody saying “We’re going to need a bigger boat,” but the line was set up so well, we don’t realize immediately, that he isn’t joking. I had forgotten that he actually insists on getting the bigger boat twice more after that. That’s the only conclusion he honestly can come to.
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