Movie Night With Urbaniak: Amblin’, Jaws

Anyway, I remember seeing Jaws opening weekend like it was yesterday. The drive to the theater, the feeling when we walked in seven minutes late (packed theater, the shot on the screen, the electricity in the room) the shrieks and laughs from the crowd. Jaws hookedthe audience in a way I don’t think I’ve ever seen an audience hooked since, except maybe Star Wars and Alien. Spielberg’s effortless command of flow, rhythm and tension jerked that crowd around like, well, like a shark jerking around young Chrissie Watkins in the first scene.

I had had the movie bug ever since The Poseidon Adventure in 1972, but Jaws hit my consciousness like an atom bomb. I was obsessed with the movie, saw it many times in the theater, bought, read and re-read the two “making of” books, cut out ads from the newspapers, bought the poster and had it up on my wall for many years, kept track of the grosses and how long it played in which theaters. Think of this: there were theaters in Chicago where Jaws played for over a year. I paid attention to the way scenes were shot and cut, wondered why some shots followed others, paid attention to the way the audience’s senses were manipulated. You could say that before Jaws I understood there was a thing called a movie, but after Jaws I understood there was a thing called making a movie.  I wrote a short story for English class about a screening of Jaws where the projector breaks in the middle of the movie and a riot ensues, and the teacher read it aloud to the class and gave me an A.

How successful was Jaws? It made over $470 million in 1975 — that’s $1.8 billion in present-day dollars. Jurassic Park, in contrast, made half that much.

I don’t know — is there a movie out there that can affect an audience like Jaws did in 1975? For that matter, is there an audience out there prepared to be affected like this by a movie again? Jaws, and Spielberg, was one of the few cultural things my father and I agreed on (Star Wars was another, and The Godfather). There’s the famous rack/zoom shot of Chief Brody on the beach, and my father took great care to explain to me that Spielberg had lifted it from Vertigo, but couldn’t believe that this kid had taken a shot that Hitchcock had used as the exclamation point of his masterpiece and essentially tossed it away for a minor Act I plot-point — even he understood that this was a serious filmmaking talent to be reckoned with.

I have a great deal to say about the script of Jaws, which I plan to do in several parts over the next week or so, with your indulgence. But to kick things off

  came over and we watched it on the big screen (which is well worth it — the 25th-anniversary DVD has a wonderful transfer) and we talked about the acting.

Urbaniak noted, first off, that the movie has some of the best extra work of all time, and I heartily agree with him. And as the first two acts of Jaws is about a man battling a society instead of a shark, that work is important. Spielberg always does well with crowd scenes for some reason (the crowd scenes in Sugarland and Close Encounters are similarly vivid) and he has an uncanny knack for casting and directing great masses of humanity, a much greater talent than, say, Cecil B. Demille, where the mass is always just that — a mass, not a collection of individuals. Spielberg’s crowds always teem with detail, contradiction and humanity. Whether it’s the out-of-town fisherman who’s never heard of a tiger shark, or Quint’s little fisherman-pal with the greasy orange hat and the dog, or the prim, dyspeptic motel-owning city council-woman, Spielberg somehow manages to find people who look and act genuine and put dozens of them in scenes and have them all interacting with each other, and I don’t know how he does it. The yahoo shark-hunting armada, the Fourth of July crowd scenes, the panics on the beaches, there isn’t a single false beat in them, and these are all hugely complicated scenes with a lot going on in them.

Take the scene on the dock where they’ve caught the tiger shark. There are a half-dozen brilliant, brilliant one-and-two-line performances in that scene, most from people uncredited. The rhythms and cutting in the scene keep going with what I’ve come to think of as a typically Spielbergian fluidity, even though only a couple of the faces on screen belong to trained movie stars. So many little moments pass by as Brody and Hooper move through the crowd, playing their own scenes, all the beats ring true, and in the middle of all this come Mrs. Kintner, the mother of the little boy killed a few scenes earlier. In one of the great one-scene performances of the decade, easily beating the one-scene performance of Beatrice Strait in Network, an actress named Lee Fierro walks into frame, with her black dress and veil, and strikes Brody on the side of his head. I’m guessing the script said that she slaps him, but she doesn’t really. She looks like she’s trying to, but her aim is off and she kind of clubs him on the ear instead. And then delivers this incredible speech about how her boy’s death is Brody’s fault and so forth. And she’s playing a mother who has just come from the funeral of her little boy but she doesn’t play the grief, instead she plays the composure. Her grief is there as a subtext, and sitting on top of her grief is her anger, but what she’s playing is a woman trying not to reveal either her grief or her anger. The results are devastating. This is the Act I climax, a crucial scene to the protagonist’s arc, and Spielberg gave it to an actress who had never appeared on screen before and, apart from being in Jaws: The Revenge, would never appear on screen again, and she knocks it out of the park.

Then there’s Robert Shaw. And given the depth and validity that every other performance in the movie delivers, it’s kind of weird to see Robert Shaw swan in halfway through the movie and give the peculiar performance he gives here. It’s a very “actory” performance, very “look ma, I’m acting,” and while he’s never less than compelling, he never feels like he’s really that guy, which I get no problem from Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss. I suppose Quint is supposed to be larger than life, that that’s the whole point of the performance, and once the movie moves out to open sea Shaw takes over the narrative and drives the conflict for the whole second half. But in my mind I keep thinking of Sterling Hayden, who played General Ripper in Dr. Strangelove and Roger Wade in The Long Goodbye and was Spielberg’s first choice to play the part. Hayden was very much like Quint, lived on a boat and wrote books about the sea, and whenever I watch Jaws these days I keep imagining Quint’s scenes as performed by Hayden. And so, as both Urbaniak and I do passable Sterling Hayden impressions, we proceeded to do just that, reading Quint’s lines as Hayden, in his gruff, slurry, side-of-the-mouth delivery — something Shaw even approximates a couple of times himself, as in: “Chief — put out the fire, will ya?”

Scheider and Dreyfuss are, of course, splendid.

Oh, and as a warm-up we also watched Amblin‘, Spielberg’s first movie, his 24-minute short that got him the Night Gallery job (it is commercially unavailable — another item courtesy of my local cool video store). I’ll write about Amblin’ shortly, but let’s just say for now that Jaws is the better movie.