Latest Essay: Jaws: The Perfect Movie

Latest List: Genuinely Frightening Movies

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say’. ~Anaïs Nin

‘I try to leave out the parts that people skip’. ~Elmore Leonard

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You have found my writing blog. Principally a novelist and essayist, I enjoy writing on a very wide range of subjects.

I am also a life-long maker of lists, so an at least vaguely associated list will appear with each new essay. They are intended to get you thinking and maybe disagreeing, occasionally to prick your anger, to force you to confront your own views.

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I ALSO KEEP A LONDON BLOG, A MIXTURE OF ORIGINAL PHOTOS, OBSERVATIONS AND DISCUSSION ABOUT THE GREATEST CITY ON EARTH.................www.williamruby.blogspot.co.uk/

LATEST ESSAY:

Jaws: The Perfect Movie  

Jaws may not be the greatest movie I have ever seen but it is my favourite movie, the one I have re-watched more than any other, the one I turn to in times of stress and disorientation. It is also, unarguably, a great film. Those repeated viewings have confirmed that it is as close to the perfect movie experience as can be had in one fairly short sitting. 

Spielberg hit on a formula that was so good, so early, that he was either doomed from that moment to repeat or forsake it to varying degrees throughout the rest of his career. The fact that he did both regularly is testament to his talent and artistic self-awareness; his successes (Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan et al) and his failures (Amistad, Hook et al) are all the more predictable and indeed understandable with hindsight given this realisation. An artist has to fight the expectations of his audience now and then, even if it leads him into a critical cul-de-sac.

By deconstructing both America's iconoclastic Moby Dick mythology and Peter Benchley's overripe pulp fiction novel, and by giving us a movie featuring an arguable record of six of the accepted seven story types--overcoming the monster, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, re-birth (at least in Chief Brodie manning-up against his landlubber fear of the water)--without falling on his creative ass, the young director showed a sure-footedness and nerve that few have emulated or bettered. The dramatic arc that is so essential to the action-adventure-monster-horror sub-genres that Jaws sits astride is so clean and clear in Spielberg's work here that its form should be shaped in tungsten-steel and attached to the top of his (eventual) gravestone like the rocks placed on Oskar Schindler's own memorial stone by those he saved.

I was eleven years-old when I first saw Jaws at the cinema back in 1975: it was the ABC on Lord Street, Southport, now long-gone. My mother had to accompany me as the film had that now-forgotten British A classification: shocks and gore for all the family. The queue to get in stretched around the block. The anticipation of weeks.....precipitated by that glorious blue and red soft porn poster with its snaggle-toothed leviathan, snatches of the mesmerising John Williams title score, a hype coming across the Atlantic that set the standard for all such similar things in the future.....turned to the sheer unalloyed joy and terror of seeing the thing in an audience that billowed and screeched like two parrots stuck in a sack. It remains the single most memorable cinema event of my life.

That night I dreamt that my bedroom was filled with water and I definitely wasn't alone in there. I spent months studying sharks, worrying about sharks, fantasising about sharks. What other movie has done that to me? None. My impressionable age was clearly a factor here, but how else but that the movie is the perfect imaginative catalyst to explain a similar impact on so many much older people?

Here are ten other reasons why Jaws is so good:

1. It has been much imitated, never bettered. Alien runs it closest. Ridley Scott clearly loved Jaws. He simply must have done.

2. The opening sequence....the first death....is quite the most terrifying spectacle yet conjured up to introduce us to a movie's content. 'Come on in the water' she said.......

3. As its principle actors Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider offer a master class in the naturalistic delivery of an already highly accomplished script. Scene after scene is profoundly good. Scheider and Dreyfuss in particular are completely believable as the New York cop and millionaire marine biologist who become unlikely buddies. Shaw was simply marvellously entertaining; his is the only 'overwritten' character in the piece, but is none the worse for it. Dreyfuss and Shaw apparently didn't see eye to eye at all on and off the set. Not only does this show, it actually adds gloss to what we see on screen.

4. Minor characters resound as in few other films, not least Murray Hamilton's oily Mayor Vaughan and Lorraine Gary's totally sympathetic Ellen Brodie. Everybody gets good lines: a rare thing in any film.

5. Spielberg chose not to tell Dreyfuss that Mrs Kintner (actress Lee Fierro) was going to slap Scheider's Brodie hard across the face in the scene where she confronts him at the dock. His filmed reaction to the force she employs is real and classic.

6. The Brodie beach 'Vertigo' shot. Maybe it was a throwaway from an earlier film age by the time Spielberg employed it, but it is daring and dextrous enough to add colour. Hitch would have been pleased by it.

7. Jaws literally swims with great lines, many uttered of course by that old seadog Quint, but immortally in Brodie's shocked assertion that that more capacity was required for the purpose. Where would we be in so many aspects of modern life without this single stock phrase (what do you mean, you don't know it?!)?

8. The John Milius-scripted 'Indianapolis' speech from Quint, complete with it's mournful whale call, is up there with the greatest of all film monologues, an atmospheric moment almost without equal.

9. Trumpet. As the 4th of July dawns and the masses swarm onto Amity Island, a cheerful trumpet solo accompanies them from the score. It is so incongruous and mood-altering that the viewer momentarily forgets the danger that lurks ahead......just as in real life. A little touch of genius.

10. Anchors. The little white anchors all over one of the mayor's several garish sports jackets. I don't use this word often for all the obvious reasons, but wow.

Jaws remains a major reference point in western popular culture and its creators and producers are the chief architects of the blockbuster season movie events that have largely shaped the Hollywood scene ever since. The sense it provokes--of that wholesome nirvana threatened and defended---is the essence of so much of American drama as realised through film, and as relevant today as it was in 1975.

If you haven't seen this masterpiece recently, please do seek it out again.

William Ruby


Latest list:

10 Genuinely Frightening Movies (for very different reasons)

The Exorcist
Jaws
The Shining
The Sixth Sense
Silence of the Lambs
Psycho
Alien
Rosemary's Baby
Paranormal Activity
Schindler's List