Jaws (1975)

 

Jaws begins, somewhat innocently enough, with a group of young people around a fire on the beach at night. They’re smoking and drinking and talking with each other in small groups. A young woman and young man make eye contact, and he starts to follow her after she walks away from the fire. He winds up having to try to catch up to her as she runs toward the water, but he’s too drunk to run as fast as she is and take his clothes off at the same time. She dives in, leaving him lying on the beach. A few horrifying moments later, we watch as something beneath the surface violently attacks her. She will be the first victim of an especially aggressive and particularly vindictive shark. We just don’t know that yet (unless we have read the best-selling novel by Peter Benchley upon which the film was based).

The overall plot is certainly familiar to people who haven’t even seen the film. After it’s clear that a shark is swimming off the shore of Amity, the police chief and a couple of other people try to keep people safe. They find themselves stymied by the townspeople who worry that closing the beaches and keeping people out of the water during the summer would be disastrous to the island’s financial success. That they would personally benefit from the beaches remaining open is certainly an important factor. However, the town can withstand only so many deaths, and the killing of a young boy in full view of a crowded beach leads to a ridiculous bounty hunt to rid the island of this dangerous predator.

Much of the second half of the film takes place aboard the Orca, the ship owned by Quint, a local “expert” shark hunter. He, the police chief, and an oceanographer the chief has consulted venture into the ocean in search of a so-called “rogue” shark, and that’s when the real adventure begins. The banter aboard the Orca is some of the best dialog in the film, and even if many of the lines have become justifiably famous (“you’re gonna need a bigger boat”), they still resonate. It’s a back-and-forth hunt that builds in intensity the longer they’re at sea, and the talk about the journey is a welcome relief from the long stretches of waiting.

The acting in Jaws is uniformly good. As Police Chief Brody, Roy Scheider is stoic, deadpan, and solid as the only person in this small island town who tries to do the right thing and close down the beaches. Richard Dreyfus plays oceanographer Matt Hooper with a great deal of humor and smart ass attitude. Hooper is the one who tries to convince the leaders of Amity that the threat from the shark is significant, but he only manages to convince Brody. As Brody’s wife, Lorraine Gary brings a warmth and vulnerability and tenderness to a role that she would play over and over again in most of the unnecessary sequels that followed.

I’d like to single out Murray Hamilton, though, a great character actor, in the role of Mayor Larry Vaught. He’s so good as the guy who puts money first, the guy who gets it all wrong, the guy whose misguided decisions cause so much death. He’s so representative of the kind of small-town politics where personal interests and private agendas become the reasons for decision making. Who counts as an “islander” and who doesn’t clearly matters in Amity, and Hamilton is especially adept at showing the mayor’s ability to undermine Brody’s authority because the chief wasn’t born on the island. Yes, a shark might be killing people in the waters off Amity, but the Fourth of July holiday is one of the biggest moneymaking days of the year, you see? Well, you would see if you were from Amity.

Robert Shaw as Quint deserves a special mention as well. He’s wild. It’s as if he’s decided that this is a pirate movie, and he’s the most seasoned pirate of them all. He looks at everyone else with a sense of derision and yet finds most of their behavior amusing. Shaw can also play drunk better than almost anyone. Still, he’s quite capable of being spellbinding such as when Quint shares stories about what happened on the U.S.S. Indianapolis at the end of World War II, one of the most famous shark stories of all time. Yes, of course, he’s clearly riffing on Ahab from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick at times, but when it’s this entertaining, who cares? Shaw takes what is truly a supporting part and steals the movie from the actors with the larger roles.

As almost everyone knows, it’s almost an hour into the film before the shark actually makes an appearance on screen. Famously, the mechanical shark would work just fine until it entered the water, and then it would not cooperate. Director Steven Spielberg and his crew had to become very creative in building tension and giving a sense of the shark’s presence without it physically showing up on the screen. One of the mechanical sharks is now on display at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, and it’s a treat to have it dangling above you in clear view as you ascend a staircase.

The cinematography and editing in Jaws are first rate. Watching it again after taking and teaching film studies classes makes me appreciate its achievements even more. It’s particularly good at conveying a sense of panic and fear in the crowd scenes. They’re very carefully choreographed and effective. I didn’t know what a “Vertigo shot” was in 1975, but even without that knowledge, when the camera zooms in on Scheider’s face on the beach as he watches a shark attack, you feel tense even if you couldn’t explain how or why. That famous music by John Williams certainly adds to the film’s suspense. Who could have guessed that two memorable notes would have such an impact, but without the shark itself on the screen for much of the film, the music carries a lot of power with those notes.

Jaws was one of the first and biggest summer blockbusters of the modern era of filmmaking, and it’s nice to see that the Academy still had respect for a film that was released in the middle of the year. Nowadays, it might have been forgotten by the time the Christmas rush of “prestigious” awards-bait movies appears. Spielberg was famously snubbed in the Best Director category, but I think the Academy has perhaps made that oversight up to him in the intervening years.

I recently watched Jaws on an IMAX screen for the 50^th anniversary of its release, and I’m both in awe of what I missed back in 1975 by seeing it on a much smaller screen and very grateful that I didn’t see it in such a large format back then. I saw it for the first time at the beautiful Genesee Theater in Waukegan, Illinois, and was forced to sit in the front row of the theater because my younger brother, who brought his babysitter with us, was obsessed with sitting in the front row for movies, not a location I’m particularly going to choose myself if there are any options.

So many people have seen this film, so I don’t think I’m spoiling any key plot points by telling you about a moment that was scary enough for me on the regular screen at the Genessee. Police Chief Brody and Hooper are investigating a seemingly abandoned boat owned by one of the local fishermen. Hooper dives into the night waters and discovers an enormous hole on the side of the boat. There’s also a large tooth embedded in the hole, clear evidence that a shark is responsible for this destruction. At the moment that this was happening onscreen, I was trying to see the color of the M&Ms my brother’s babysitter had given me. (There was this thing about green M&Ms back then, but you can check out that urban myth for yourself.)

The babysitter, in her eagerness to make sure that I didn’t miss this dramatic moment involving the discovery of the tooth, tapped me on the shoulder. I looked up from my M&Ms-filled hand just in time to see a head pop out of the hole in the side of the boat. Frightened, I threw M&Ms all over the rows of seats near us. Needless to say, this has become THE story of our watching Jaws during its initial release, and I am reminded of it from time to time on social media. Having the 50th anniversary screening being so prominently advertised did not help.

Oscar Wins: Best Sound, Best Editing, and Best Original Dramatic Score

Other Nominations: Best Picture

The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1929-30)

 

The Case of Sergeant Grischa, another lost film, stars Chester Morris and Betty Compson, both of whom had been nominated for acting Oscars the year before. It was apparently not a financially successful film upon its release, but it was remembered by Academy voters for its use of sound. It is apparently the only sound film to be nominated for an Oscar that was later completely lost. The plot, according to IMDB, goes like this: “Sergeant Grischa Paprotkin, a simple-minded Russian soldier, escapes from a German prisoner-of-war camp. He hides out for a while with a peasant girl named Babka, but finally his longing for his homeland overcomes him. Wearing the identity of a dead Russian spy, he is soon recaptured by the Germans and sentenced to death. The German ruthlessness and disdain for justice is driven home when proof of his innocence of being the spy is brushed aside.” They sure could come up with some wild plot twists back then, couldn’t they? Much like All Quiet on the Western Front, released the same year, The Case of Sergeant Grischa was based upon a novel by a German author and was set during World War I. No copies of the film are known to exist, a sad fate shared by many earlier films.

Oscar Nomination: Best Sound Recording

Song of the Flame (1929-30)

 

Song of the Flame is a lost film from the early years of the Academy Awards; at least, it’s believed to be lost. At this point, only the audio track remains, preserving all of the songs from the film. You can actually listen to reels 1, 4, 5, 7, and 9 on YouTube, but who wants to merely listen to a movie that also features visuals? According to IMDB, the film is based upon a 1925 operetta with music by Oscar Hammerstein II, Otto Harbach, Herbert Stothart, and George Gershwin. It's the story of “a peasant who is known as ‘The Flame,’ who leads a revolution in Russia. This peasant, who is in love with a Russian prince, saves his [the prince’s] life by agreeing to sacrifice her virginity to an evil fellow-conspirator.” Heavens, that sounds enticing, doesn’t it? It stars Bernice Claire as the peasant and Alexander Gray as the prince. Noah Beery and Alice Gentle star in key supporting roles. Beery is the only one that I’d heard of, but to be fair, Gentle was better known as an opera singer, and Claire and Gray starred in a series of operetta films together, sort of predecessors to Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. Song of the Flame was their last film together, but I’ve not seen either of the other two. It was also one of the first musical films to be filmed completely in Technicolor, and it has a sequence shot in a widescreen process called Vitascope, the first color film to include widescreen. The film is also historically significant due it being released with the first Looney Tunes animated short, Sinkin’ in the Bathtub.

Oscar Nomination: Best Sound Recording

All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30)

Watching All Quiet on the Western Front always brings to mind a key point in the debate over war films: Do they glorify war by making battles seem exciting or are they inherently anti-war because they show the destruction caused by war? On one side of this debate is, allegedly, French director Francois Truffaut, who said that there was no such thing as an anti-war movie. On the other side is American director Steven Spielberg, who said that all war movies are anti-war. Perhaps they’re both correct to a degree, but it’s tough not to see All Quiet on the Western Front as a film demonstrating the futility of war and the price it exacts in the lives of the young, in particular.

Set during World War I, the film begins with a group of young German men who are incited by their teacher (professor?) to join a new company that is forming. Conveniently, a troop of soldiers marches by the open windows of their classroom just as the teacher is pushing them with talk of “protecting the fatherland”—words that should be chilling to those of us who have the perspective of history on our side. In an innovative use of technology, several of the boys are shown imagining themselves as soldiers or heroes or perhaps victims of war, and the close-ups of each daydreamer is spectacular. The editing in the film is really first-rate, and it’s a shame that there wasn’t yet an Oscar category for film editing.  

Of course, all the young men (are they truly boys?) join the military, and their “leader” is Paul Baumer (played by a very youthful Lew Ayres, later of Dr. Kildare fame). They know their drill sergeant, Himmelstoss (an unctuous John Wray), but he is no longer the friendly neighborhood mailman. No, he’s now a brutal and vindictive task master, and he makes their training painful and exhausting. They talk a lot in the barracks about how much they resent him, usually while mostly or partially unclothed (a recurring motif that highlights the healthy bodies of the young actors), and they manage to get their revenge on the night before they are supposed to go into battle. He’s prevented them from enjoying a single night of promised leave by making them march through mud, seemingly his favorite pastime, and forcing them to clear their uniforms before leaving for the front.

The film doesn’t spare us the brutality of war. It’s only about twenty minutes into the film before the first of the young men is killed. It’s a scary moment for these soldiers who probably thought they would never be the ones being shot or bombed, but the constant gunfire and explosions frighten them when they first arrive at the battlefield. With such inexperienced soldiers, you know there’s going to be a rather grizzled veteran, and he’s Corporal Stanislaus “Kat” Katczinsky, played here with great humor and generosity by Louis Wolheim. He thinks they’re not ready for battle—he’s right, naturally—but he befriends Paul and the rest by showing them how to survive.

The film features a lot of battle sequences, and they are presented with a lot of kinetic energy: soldiers running everywhere, explosions all around them, people falling into foxholes, others barricading themselves in trenches only to have the “enemy” jump into those same trenches. One of the most harrowing sequences occurs when Ayres’ Paul falls into a foxhole only to be followed by a French soldier, whom he stabs with his knife. However, the wounded man then takes a long time to die from his injury, and Paul winds up trying to save him by giving him water. Eventually, he even apologizes to the Frenchman and asks for forgiveness; he also vows to provide for the dead man’s wife and daughter. It’s one of the moments that clearly means to suggest that all of this death—and there’s a lot of death in this film—is really unnecessary.

If you need further evidence that the film’s makers are attempting to present a case against war, at least a couple of times during the film, the soldiers themselves discuss the purposes of war. They cannot see what goal is being served by killing other men. They assume that someone in one country offended someone in another country, but they aren’t feeling offended themselves. Since they’re German soldiers, they also ponder what exactly the Kaiser gets from having the country be at war. They don’t want to kill other people, and they don’t fathom why someone wants them to kill others and destroy property. Yes, I realize that there are some comic undertones to a few of the points they make, but the overall subject is quite serious, and they raise several valid and intriguing points that are still relevant today.

If you really want another poignant example from the film that shows the irony of war, consider the case of Franz, one of Paul’s classmates and fellow soldiers. He’s come to battle with a very expensive pair of leather boots, an object of envy for most of his classmates who must march is much cheaper, lower quality boots. He’s injured in battle and has one of his legs amputated. Paul gives the boots to another young soldier, Mueller, who is injured not long after he acquires the footwear. A closeup of his legs clad in the boots is the last image that we have of him.

Late in the film, after Paul recuperates from an injury, he’s allowed leave to visit his family. His mother and sister greet him with great joy, but they can’t fully comprehend what he’s endured, and he doesn’t feel comfortable telling them about the horrors he’s experienced and witnessed. A group of older men, including his father, debate what should be happening in the war and where the troops should be engaged in battle, but it’s very clear that they have no idea what’s really happening. Paul becomes so disillusioned that he returns to the frontlines earlier than expected. When he meets his company again, none of his classmates are still alive, and many of the newer soldiers are just teenagers. Only Tjaden (played with great humor by Slim Summerville) and Kat are still around… but not for long. That’s not a spoiler alert since the film was released almost a hundred years ago.

I’d like to point out two technical elements of the film that really stand out. Even though the dialog was rather, um, quiet or low in the print that I saw, the sound effects were very effective. Paired with the visual effects, they really put the audience into the realm of battle. Bombs and bullets abound in this film, and you get a clear sense of the constant danger that soldiers face. The other technical achievement worthy of note is the film’s cinematography, which was nominated for an Academy Award. It’s quite stunning, and the final sequence of Paul reaching for a butterfly during a fight is just magnificently shot. I also enjoyed the way that the camera sometimes moves through the trenches, showing the faces of the soldiers about to shoot at their fellow humans on the other side. There’s fear and strength and determination and exhaustion there.

The final image of the film—before a very long fade to black—is a superimposition of a cemetery filled with rows upon rows of white crosses and the young men from the beginning of the film as they were when they first marched off to war. We’ve all seen those cemeteries, and it’s haunting to know that it seems those soldiers were destined to rest in one of those locations, probably far from their home countries. If you still haven’t decided whether this is an anti-war film by that point, you should leave with a very strong, clear sense after watching that unfold on screen.

The film is based upon the 1929 novel by German veteran Erich Maria Remarque, and it shares the book’s emphasis on the repeated acts of trauma experienced by the soldiers. At times, they have no food to eat. We even get a scene where eighty soldiers show up, but there’s enough food for 150 men because that’s what the cook expected. However, he doesn’t want to give them double portions because that goes against the rules. Many veterans have what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and you get a very clear picture of that trauma and stress in this movie. It’s worth noting that Remarque’s novel and the film adaptation of it are primarily focused upon the German side of World War I, but it doesn’t take much imagination to see how the other side was having many of the same experiences. I don’t think it’s problematic to note that almost everyone suffers during wars, not just one side.

All Quiet on the Western Front was recut several times for rereleases over the years, so the version/s that we have today might not be exactly what audiences initially saw in 1930. It’s actually about twenty minutes shorter than the first version. The director, Lewis Milestone, was the first person to win two Oscars, having received a directing award two years earlier for helming the comedy film Two Arabian Knights, which also starred Wolheim. Another interesting Oscar history note is this was the first film to be named Best Picture (or “Outstanding Production”) and have its director be chosen for Best Director, a trend that would be quite common over the years.

Oscar Wins: Outstanding Production and Best Director (Lewis Milestone)

Other Nominations: Best Writing and Best Cinematography

Odd Man Out (1947)

 

You might need to know a little bit about the Irish nationalist movement to understand some of the finer points of Odd Man Out, a film that never directly identifies its protagonist and his fellows as anything other than members of an “organisation” rather than the Irish Republican Army in the novel on which it is based. James Mason, giving one of his best performances, plays Johnny McQueen, who’s been hiding out after escaping from prison. The “organisation” demands that he participate in the robbery of a mill to get money for their needs. The robbery goes bad, though, and Johnny kills one of the security guards and gets shot in his left arm. He falls out of the getaway car, and the film follows him as he tries to make his way back to his hideout. A parallel story involves the search by Kathleen Sullivan (played by Kathleen Ryan), the woman who’s fallen in love with Johnny and has been hiding him in her grandmother’s home, to locate and rescue him. The most interesting visual aspects of the film involve Johnny’s “visions.” While he’s hiding out in a railway station, he flashes back to his days in prison and mistakes a little neighborhood girl for someone he knew there. The camera recreates his sense of dizziness during this scene and his hazy memories of time in jail. He’s put into a carriage by some guys who think he’s drunk and manages to make it through a police barricade because no one thinks he'd actually be in a carriage. He also winds up hiding out in a private booth in a bar and starts seeing the images of all of the people he’s encountered on this strange night (and there have been a few) in the beer suds. It’s a wild visual effect, topped only by the sequence involving Johnny seeing various paintings moving about and their images coming to life. The cinematography is sharp film noir, and it makes for a stunning film visually. I can’t possibly recount all of the events of Johnny’s torturous journey, but the film’s suspense is naturally derived: Will Johnny make it back to Kathleen’s place? Will Kathleen find him in time to allow them both to escape? Did she have some sort of romantic relationship with the police officer trying to track down Johnny? How can the local priest help without compromising his moral obligations? The most authentic aspect of the film may be the way that so many people in this city don’t want to help Johnny or, at least, don’t want to be found out to have helped him. That sense of fear from what might happen if you choose the “wrong” side in an ongoing climate of political reprisals shows very clearly on the faces of those supporting characters who encounter Johnny. Interestingly, many of those supporting actors were from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, which had as one its cofounders the great William Butler Yeats. Another intriguing aspect of this film is that it was the first recipient of the BAFTA (British Academy for Film and Television Arts) for Best British Film—in fact, the first of two films directed in the late 1940s by Sir Carol Reed to receive the honor.

Oscar Nomination: Best Film Editing

Dirty Pretty Things (2003)

 

Dirty Pretty Things can be a difficult film to categorize. It’s sometimes called a thriller or a crime drama or even a romance of sorts, which it is at times, albeit a very unconventional one, certainly. It’s also a searing examination of the immigrant experience in London, that city where so many of the formerly colonized have gone to try to make a new life. I’ve always considered it primarily a character study focusing on Okwe (played perfectly by Chiwetel Ejiofor), a cab driver and night desk clerk at the Baltic Hotel who was a doctor in his home country of Nigeria. That’s quite the character description, isn’t it? Okwe always seems to be the moral center of the plot, never wanting, as he puts it, to harm anyone and always trying to do the moral or right thing. However, after he discovers a heart clogging a toilet in one of the hotel rooms, he (and we) has to confront a rather bizarre series of plot twists. The woman he loves, a Turkish immigrant named Senay (Audrey Tautou), faces the constant threat of raids by immigration officers because she’s not supposed to be working (at the hotel or at a sweatshop) or taking rent from someone else like Okwe. Their scenes together are lovely but challenging because we know what they seem unable to say: they love each other. We also learn that the hotel manager, a guy called Sneaky (Sergi Lopez), has been selling organs like kidneys on the black market in exchange for forged passports and citizenship papers, and he’s been using vacant hotel rooms as the locations for the surgeries. Befitting such dark subject matter, the film features some very evocative gritty cinematography so that we’re always aware of the kind of lives these people have to endure. Most of the characters are from somewhere other than London or England, and the international cast brings the plight of the undocumented to the surface throughout the film. Dirty Pretty Things has some exceptional actors in addition to Ejiofor and Tautou, including Sophie Okonedo as Juliette, a hooker with a good heart (and who gains a great deal of depth with the Okonedo’s performance), and Benedict Wong as Guo Yi, Okwe’s friend who works in a crematorium and helps him to obtain medical supplies from the hospital. Decades after its initial release, Dirty Pretty Things still has the ability to shock at times and to move a viewer to tears, and few films can take as many risks as it does with such great results.

Oscar Nomination: Best Original Screenplay

The 400 Blows (1959)

 

Director Francois Truffaut reportedly based The 400 Blows on his own childhood. The lead character of Antoine Doinel (played for the first time here by Jean-Pierre Leaud) is really a rather ordinary young boy who keeps getting into trouble with the school authorities and with his parents for what seem to be rather harmless actions. For example, he loses his recess time early in the film due to a “naughty” picture he’s caught with; it wasn’t his picture, and most of the other boys in the classroom had already seen it by the time it got to Antoine. Why wasn’t everyone punished? Because Antoine was the one who had the incriminating photo when the teacher turned around. To be honest, none of Antoine’s alleged crimes seem all that significant to us nowadays, at least not from my perspective. He writes some bad things on the wall after being punished by his teacher? He forgets to bring home flour from the store? He plays hooky from school with a friend and goes to the movies and to an arcade and to a centrifuge? None of these seem particularly serious, frankly, and he’s seemingly no worse than any of the other boys in his school. He just seems to get punished more. By the way, his punishment for one of his alleged crimes is conjugating? That’s a pretty severe way of getting someone to do that onerous task. We learn a bit more about his family dynamic as the movie progresses. His mother (Claire Maurier) is cheating on her husband with another man, and we realize that the man Antoine calls his father (Albert Remy) is actually his stepfather. Perhaps there’s always been tension between the three of them over their connections or disconnections. Antoine runs away from home after his stepfather slaps him in front of his classmates and stays with his friend who’s also been suspended. By the way, the reason Antoine was suspended was due to his being so inspired by a Balzac novel that he wrote a closing for his essay that was meant as a homage to the great French writer but was considered plagiarism instead. I always knew Balzac was trouble; it’s why I’ve tried to avoid reading his works. Of course, some of what Antoine does could be chalked up to youthful ignorance. He and his friend steal a typewriter from his father’s office (even though they’re apparently all marked) and try to sell it for some cash. They fail at this, so they try to return it only to see Antoine caught and then jailed for vagrancy and theft. He winds up in an observation center for juveniles, and we get to witness two remarkable sequences as a result. One is an interrogation or interview that was reportedly improvised, and you get to see Leaud at his most charming and vulnerable. The other is the final scene where an astonishing tracking shot follows him as he runs away from the detention center and winds up at the sea, a place he’s always wanted to visit. The film ends with a closeup of Antoine’s face as he stares at the camera. It’s one of the most famous endings in film history for a reason. What is going through his mind? What will happen to him next? As one of the earliest films in the French New Wave movement, The 400 Blows sets a high standard for excellence. By the way, I would like to note that the film itself pays tribute to the joy we receive from the movies. Antoine and his friend go to see a movie when they play hooky, and the whole family enjoys a night out at the cinema, talking about the film they saw on the way home. A charming film that reveals our love of the movies is quite an accomplishment.

Oscar Nomination: Best Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen