Top 20 Movie “Jaws.”

Everything started with the disappearance of a skinny-dipping blonde off the coast of Amity Island in coastal New England. Amity’s Chief of Police Martin Brody, played by Roy Scheider, had perhaps the second biggest boat for those whose careers were launched in the 15th movie on our Top 20 Movies in ranked order listing, Jaws (1975).

The movie Jaws offered perhaps the biggest career boost to highly influential producer, writer, director, and actor Steven Spielberg. At the time that Jaws was do to be made, Spielberg undoubtedly was on the rise. He was selected to direct the cinema worthy of the marketing buzz created for Peter Benchley‘s 1974 book Jaws. As the Turner Classic Movie (TCM) telling informs us, producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown had acquired rights for producing a movie from Benchley’s book. Spielberg, who has earned much influence in the film industry, was their directorial choice.

We as the audience get to know Amity police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) best. Much of Jaws is told from Brody’s perspective, and we wind up rooting for him as the hero.

Brody is pitted against two primary antagonists.

The first and obvious antagonist is the main attraction…the Great White Shark that brought people to the movie theater. Perhaps the iconic quote of the movie comes when Jaws (the shark) is battling Brody and fellow protagonist, boat-owner, and seaman Quint (played by Robert Shaw). Brody spoke the quote to Quint:

“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

I personally admire the popularity and resonance of the quote, in addition for the context that prompted it. Part of that context is the second main antagonist.  Amity Island’s money-obsessed, safety-last Mayor Larry Vaughn, played by Murray Hamilton, partially responds to outside pressure from the business community in advocating for maintaining an open beachfront around the lucrative Independence Day timeframe. After all, this middle-of-summer period is when people travel to the tourist town of Amity Island for sand, water, lodging, and tourism.

In the midst of this, and after the death of the skinny dipping lady to start the movie, a boy is attacked by the shark we know to be Jaws. Richard Dreyfuss plays Matt Hooper, an oceanographer fascinated with sharks who hired Quint to hunt and kill that shark that had staked a claim to Amity Island.

The building tension and focus on the main story line of the killer shark, the reluctant mayor, and the struggle to kill a shark swimming around Amity Island is aided by a famous soundtrack created by renowned composer John Williams. In providing the compelling theme song to Jaws, Williams‘ music is as much of a character in the movie as the characters, the tension, and the shark.

In the heat of the fight to close the beach, the film Jaws and its director (Spielberg) are given a tip of the cap in the naming of Bryan Singer’s production company. Chief Brody responds to an elderly gentleman teasing Brody for not going in the water. As Mental Floss explains, the elderly man is Harry, he is wearing an ugly swimming cap, and the line itself is this:

“That’s some bad hat, Harry.”

Bad Hat Harry Productions goes on to produce House M.D. (2004-2012) and The Usual Suspects (1995).

Steven Spielberg has won Academy Awards for Best Director for Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Best Picture and Best Director for Schindler’s List (1993). He also won Best Director Golden Globes for both of those films.

As we are reminded by this Five Thirty Eight article, the opening of Jaws (1975) in June of that year is considered “the beginning of the era of the Hollywood summer blockbuster.” If you haven’t already seen this movie, you really should.

Matt – Friday, February 10, 2017

Top 20 Movie “The French Connection.”

Back in December, Lynn and I decided to post my listing of the Top 20 Movies in Ranked Order. These would be movies that added something significant to the course of cinema, were groundbreaking in some way, highlighted an up-and-coming actor in a great movie, or was the best movie example of a great filmmaker. A movie that tells a great story helped in making the list. That a movie is one that I can enjoy watching repeatedly is another.

The movie that came in the 20th position on my listing is The French Connection (1971), which starred a young Gene Hackman in the leading role as Popeye Doyle. I choose to quote the Roger Ebert website to give you some sense for why this is a great movie, worthy of the 20th position on my listing.

Roger Ebert’s review of The French Connection (1971). Among other things, I couldn’t agree more with Roger Ebert that the movie included a great story, an excellent chase scene, and a performance for Gene Hackman that launched his career as a leading man in movies. That the chase scene tends to crowd some of the other compelling qualities of this 1971 movie did not bar the movie from my list, though it in part did move it to the twentieth spot.

The French Connection” is routinely included, along with “Bullitt,” “Diva” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” on the short list of movies with the greatest chase scenes of all time. What is not always remembered is what a good movie it is apart from the chase scene. It featured a great early Gene Hackman performance that won an Academy Award, and it also won Oscars for best picture, direction, screenplay and editing.

The movie is all surface, movement, violence and suspense. Only one of the characters really emerges into three dimensions: Popeye Doyle Gene Hackman, a New York narc who is vicious, obsessed and a little mad. The other characters don’t emerge because there’s no time for them to emerge. Things are happening too fast.

The story line hardly matters. It involves a $32 million shipment of high-grade heroin smuggled from Marseilles to New York hidden in a Lincoln Continental. A complicated deal is set up between the French people, an American money man and the Mafia. Doyle, a tough cop with a shaky reputation who busts a lot of street junkies, needs a big win to keep his career together. He stumbles on the heroin deal and pursues it with a single-minded ferocity that is frankly amoral. He isn’t after the smugglers because they’re breaking the law; he’s after them because his job consumes him.

Director William Friedkin constructed “The French Connection” so surely that it left audiences stunned. And I don’t mean that as a reviewer’s cliché: It is literally true. In a sense, the whole movie is a chase. It opens with a shot of a French detective keeping the Continental under surveillance, and from then on the smugglers and the law officers are endlessly circling and sniffing each other. It’s just that the chase speeds up sometimes, as in the celebrated car-train sequence.

In “Bullitt,” two cars and two drivers were matched against each other at fairly equal odds. In Friedkin’s chase, the cop has to weave through city traffic at 70 m.p.h. to keep up with a train that has a clear track: The odds are off-balance. And when the train’s motorman dies and the train is without a driver, the chase gets even spookier: A man is matched against a machine that cannot understand risk or fear. This makes the chase psychologically more scary, in addition to everything it has going for it visually.

The movie was shot during a cold and gray New York winter, and it has a doomed, gritty look. The landscape is a waste land, and the characters are hardly alive. They move out of habit and compulsion, long after ordinary human feelings have lost the power to move them. Doyle himself is a bad cop, by ordinary standards; he harasses and brutalizes people, he is a racist, he endangers innocent people during the chase scene (which is a high-speed ego trip). But he survives. He wins, too, but that hardly matters. “The French Connection” is as amoral as its hero, as violent, as obsessed and as frightening.

The key to the chase is that it occurs in an ordinary time and place. No rules are suspended; Popeye’s car is racing down streets where ordinary traffic and pedestrians can be found, and his desperation is such that we believe, at times, he is capable of running down bystanders just to win the contest. I had an opportunity at the Hawaii Film Festival in 1992 to analyze the sequence a shot at a time, using a stop-action laserdisc approach, at a seminar honoring the work of the cinematographer, Owen Roizman. He recalled the way the whole chase was painstakingly story-boarded and then broken down into shots that were possible and safe, even though actual locations were being employed. Lenses were chosen to play with distance, so that the car sometimes seemed closer to hazards than it was. But essentially, the chase looked real because its many different parts were real: A car threads through city streets, chasing an elevated train.

The other key element in the film, of course, is Hackman. He was already well known in 1971, after performances in such films as “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Downhill Racer” and “I Never Sang for My Father.” But it’s probably “The French Connection” that launched his long career as a leading character sta r– a man with the unique ability to make almost any dialogue plausible. As Popeye Doyle, he generated an almost frightening single-mindedness, a cold determination to win at all costs, which elevated the stakes in the story from a simple police cat-and-mouse chase into the acting-out of Popeye’s pathology. The chase scene has, in a way, been a mixed blessing, distracting from the film’s other qualities.

Matt – Sunday, January 15, 2017