Word: sharked
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...makes it a special case, like The Godfather, is that it is quite a good movie. For one thing, it is mercifully free of the padding-cosmic, comic, cultural-that so often mars "big" pictures. In that sense, the movie is very like its subject. If the great white shark that terrorizes the beaches of an island summer colony is one of nature's most efficient killing machines, Jaws is an efficient entertainment machine...
...Irving Wallace country, reinvestigating such tired phenomena as the uneasy marriage, the adulterous wife, the 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...
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...
Jaws contains classic sequences of suspense. In the first shark attacks-on a skinny-dipping adolescent and a little boy bobbing serenely on his air mattress -the audience is in possession of information the characters do not have. It knows the danger but cannot shout effective warning to the innocents on the screen. This is Hitchcock technique in a context the master has never explored. Steven Spielberg, 27, one of the top young directors around, is no Hitchcock yet by a long shot. For one thing, his characters lack the quirks and little guilts that make Hitchcock's creations...
...larger the budget and the longer the shooting schedule, the closer the movie comes to the edge of catastrophe. Jaws flirted with disaster on land and water, in front of the cameras and behind. At one time or another, the film makers did battle with a recalcitrant mechanical shark, intrepid sailors and high-living yachtsmen, larcenous townspeople, tourists who were both curious about the movie and miffed that their vacations were being disrupted, striking labor unions and, inevitably, the elements. Spielberg says now, "Jaws should never have been made. It was an impossible effort...