1975 thriller, dir. Steven Spielberg, Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw:
IMDb /
allmovie.
You can't close the beaches if only one person has died…
Yup, indeed, a film I had never seen. (Lyz, will you un-shun me
now?) There are no real surprises of course; the plot has filtered out
into popular culture well enough, and in turn that allowed me to
concentrate on the filmic detail.
As someone who's mostly met Spielberg's later work, it's great to see
him at his early peak while he still had ideas. Yeah, all right,
there's that dolly zoom straight out of Vertigo during the attack on
Alex. But apart from that there's a naturalistic style of filming
which, for the most part, leaves one ignoring the position of the
camera and the composition of the shot in favour of noticing what's
happening and who's who. (And one can always tell who is where; the
boat, in particular, is a set with very interesting constraints on how
one moves about it.)
Pity one can't be as positive about the music of John Williams; it's
probably heresy to criticise the motif, and I won't, but
particularly in later scenes the grinding gearshifts from "menacing
music" to "adventurous music" and back as the tone of the action
changes make themselves very obvious.
The class envy of the book is largely downplayed here and centred in
Quint; meanwhile the triad, of Brody with Hooper the over-civilised
and Quint the under-civilised, is made more interesting. It's Hooper
and Quint who get into the scar-showing contest, and Brody who's
standing off to the side as they bond. Meanwhile the relationship
shown between Ellen and Brody is superb, not the filmic clichés of a
couple coming together or coming apart, but simply a solid marriage.
"Want to take him home?" "Back to New York?" "No. Home, here." Ellen's
asking about New York with full knowledge of what either choice might
mean, and she's prepared for either answer; if she weren't, she
wouldn't be asking.
Maybe not one of my favourite films ever, and of course I deplore the
way it affected people's view of sharks when they mistook fiction for
reality, but my word it's a remarkably good film, clichés of male
bonding and all.
Once more if you want more of my witterings you should listen to
Ribbon of Memes.
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