From Russia with Jaws

I watched Jaws on tv at the weekend. Amazingly I watched it on itv and there were hardly any advert breaks – I counted only one in the last hour. That’s beside the point. Its huge fun that film, but one of those films I wish I had seen at the cinema first time round, rather than on tv. It must have been pretty scary stuff. The thing is, is that like Star Wars it the supporting cast that I like the most. After years of Star Wars I suddenly realised that R2D2 is the best character. And in Jaws, its not Brody (Scheider) the police chief or the shark (“Bruce” – apparently named after Spielberg’s lawyer), or even Hooper (Dreyfuss) but it is Quint (Robert Shaw) that steals the show for me. ‘From Russia With Love’ was on on Sunday night and there he is again as the hitman out to kill Bond. This time he’s a younger fitter assassin with that Ayran look that Spectre (or was it Smersh?) were so fond of. The picture shows him next to No.3 (!) Rosa Klebb, she with the venomous spike in her shoe who is dealt with by the until then completely useless but stunning Russian honeytrap. Bond’s line: “I think she’s had her kicks…”. Shaw’s character has a name in this film but it doesn’t really matter who he is, other than being the ruthless silent psychopath who kills anyone that crosses him. Shaw’s undoing is not unlike that of David McCallum’s in The Great Escape. His use of language betrays him – Shaw’s expression of calling Bond ‘old man’ is, even in 1963, an outmoded expression.

Skip forward twelve years takes us to 1975 and Jaws. Shaw has certainly lost his looks, but the murderous look is still in his eyes. He looks half dead too, which could be due to make-up and the rigours of filming on and in the sea with a shark that became known as ‘The Great White Turd’ due to its inability to do anything other than sink. Quint (Shaw) only turns up in the latter half of the film, when Brody charters him to go out and hunt down the Great White which has been so successfully savaging Amity Island. One of the most celebrated scenes of the film is when the hapless hunting party are comparing scars, and Hooper points out a scar on Quint’s upper arm. Quint than recounts this horrific tale of the sinking of his ship the USS Indianapolis at the end of WW2 and then being in the water for 3 days with 1100 men being viciously attacked by sharks, and at the end only 300 being rescued. Its already been well established in the film that Shaw is the old seadog, Brody as the landlubber and Hooper as a rich college kit with lots of toys but no sea-sense. What this scene does is provide an insight into the gleam of madness in Quint’s eyes. I’m sure that if I had read Moby Dick and would be able to draw some kind of comparison with Ahab. But I haven’t so I can’t. What I can say is that Quint makes this film for me. He’s unhinged for sure, but he knows what he’s doing, which now I think about it could be applied to both Hooper and Brody too. So then Jaws in 4 words: Killer Shark, Mad People.