31 Days of Halloween: Day Twelve

Jaws (1975 Rated PG in the US for Blood, a misbehaving shark and perfection)

Summary (from IMDB):

It’s a hot summer on Amity Island, a small community whose main business is its beaches. When new Sheriff Martin Brody discovers the remains of a shark attack victim, his first inclination is to close the beaches to swimmers. This doesn’t sit well with Mayor Larry Vaughn and several of the local businessmen. Brody backs down to his regret as that weekend a young boy is killed by the predator. The dead boy’s mother puts out a bounty on the shark and Amity is soon swamped with amateur hunters and fisherman hoping to cash in on the reward. A local fisherman with much experience hunting sharks, Quint, offers to hunt down the creature for a hefty fee. Soon Quint, Brody and Matt Hooper from the Oceanographic Institute are at sea hunting the Great White shark. As Brody succinctly surmises after their first encounter with the creature, they’re going to need a bigger boat.

RB Wood’s Rating (Out of 5): All the stars.  All of them.  Not just 5.

There are five movies in the world that I will sit and watch over and over again:  Casablanca (1942), The Godfather (1972), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)…

And Jaws.

This is the Steven Spielberg of old.  A yound director trying to prove himself.  And it’s absolutely brilliant. The late Roy Scheider is marvelous as Martin Brody, the new Sheriff in the sleepy fictional Cape Cod community of Amity.  He, Richard Dreyfuss as rich-kid oceanographer Matt Hooper and Quint (Robert Shaw) are the leads, but by no means the only shinning stars of this horror classic.  However, when our three intrepid shark hunters are out on Quint’s boat, the Orca, the acting, the writing and the dirction are perfection.  From Quint’s storry about the Indianapolis, to his ultimate demise as he slowly slides into the maw of the beast.  Cinematic history.

The suspense is built brilliantly, as we never see the Shark until Scheider’s Brody is chumming the water…uttering the famous “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”  Not your slasher/splatter horror, this is suspense, and terror built slowly, masterfully until the audience is as frightened as the Amity Island populace.

See this movie.  But be warned, it took me two years to go back into the water after my first viewing.

Tomorrow: “Come and get it! It’s a running buffet!”

Peace