Word: quints
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...snaky seducer. In the movie, most of this lallygagging is eliminated. Police Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) must still fight the town's mayor, who is fearful that closing the beaches after the first shark attacks will ruin his resort's economy. He still joins forces with Quint, the professional shark killer (Robert Shaw, employing an ornate accent of indeterminate origin), and a youthful ichthyologist named Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), all theory and wisecracks. Scheider is occasionally too recessive for his own good, while Shaw is too excessive for the good of the film. Dreyfuss, however, is perfect. With...
This perfectly ill-assorted trio sets out in the Orca, Quint's leaky craft, to bring the marauding great white to his reward. Ideal adversary that he is, the shark proves stronger and more wily than anyone suspected. The men go after him with rifles. They try to slow him down with barrels, fight him, tire him, tow him. In desperation Hooper descends below the surface in a shark cage (the sequence for which Carl Rizzo was hired), armed with a poison gun that will get the job done-if he can shoot it directly into the creature...
...Universal might as well pay my salary straight into the IRS." Shaw feels even worse about Bruce. The 25-foot polyurethane shark with hydraulic guts has been programmed to nip him to death -gently. But recently says Shaw, who plays the obsessed shark killer Quint, he was chasing Bruce in a fishing boat when the automated man-eater turned on his pursuers and tore a hole in the boat's underside. "My ship almost sank under me," said Shaw, adding: "What worries me is who's going to keep those mechanical teeth from sinking in too deep...
Properly handled, such a gimmick might have launched a spoof of James' involuted style or a parody of Freudian criticism (scholars have wrangled for decades about whether the ghosts of Quint and Jessel are merely figments of the new governess's sexually starved imagination). Director-Producer Michael Winner, however, tries for a pretentious shocker in fancy dress. He serves up a pastiche of sexual sadism, witchcraft (two dolls are burned in chamber pots) and a pair of Quintessential messages: love and hate are synonymous; the dead just hang around wherever they are killed...
Moreover, Winner wants the audience to believe that the children (aged about 9 and 11) regard any thing Quint says as literally true. Chil dren are often cruel but rarely that stupid. Quint lapses into a sodden, brogue-trotting Irishman, who mumbles to Miles, "If you love someone, sometimes you really want to kill them." Pow! Wilde! The governess drowns in the tarn - from an acute case of sabotaged rowboat. Quint is struck down, like St. Sebastian, by Miles' bow and arrow...