Jaws (USA, 1975)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gray

When interviewed for Bravo's The 100 Scariest Movie Moments, Clive Barker commented that sometimes the best ideas of how to scare people are so seemingly obvious that we overlook them without realising. In hindsight it seems absurd that no-one ever considered making a horror film about sharks before. And after Steven Spielberg set the bar with Jaws, no-one would ever come close again.Jaws is Spielberg doing what he does best: pure popcorn entertainment, with a school of memorable scenes, cracking dialogue and substance trickling through in amongst the thrills and spills. What seems on the surface to be a one-trick film drawn out over two hours gradually emerges as something which is not only scary but very well-made, with characters which are intelligently drawn and action scenes which communicate the themes rather than feeling like awkward set-pieces.Like Star Wars after it, you could be forgiven for hating Jaws given the legacy it has left behind. Apart from the three inferior sequels and dozens of derivative knock-offs, it was the film which invented both the summer blockbuster and the high-concept movie -a film which you could sum up in 25 words or less, which would be translated by producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer into the aggressive money-driven ethos of modern Hollywood.Jaws has been blamed for everything from the death of New Hollywood to the infantilisation of mainstream cinema, and that's not to mention the recent criticism of conservationists about falling shark numbers. But whatever one's attitude to Spielberg in light of his subsequent career choices, it's at best guesswork and at worst sour grapes to argue that he intended any of these things to happen. Had he gone the path of his colleague George Lucas, and milked his hit for everything it had, only then would it be fair to pose such questions.With this in mind we have to re-assess Jaws as nothing more than a piece of entertainment. And on that level, it's undeniably brilliant. In adapting Peter Benchley's potboiler, Spielberg quickly dispensed of the melodramatic subplots involving extramarital affairs and power struggles on Amity Island. On this occasion, it was best to quite literally cut to the chase, with the shark becoming the centrepiece and fear being the driving force.

Spielberg once described Jaws as an aquatic version of Duel, his made-for-TV film from four year earlier about a man being chased by a truck. The comparison is very close both in Spielberg's knack for creating tension and in the characterisation of the villain. Both the truck and the shark are irrational forces of nature: they have no backstory, no character origin and no discernable motivation other than a relentless desire to kill. As a further connection, the deaths of both truck and shark are overdubbed with the sound of Godzilla dying from the 1954 original - an indication of Spielberg's affinity for B-movies and that he understands that monster movies can have a deeper significance.As with Duel, it doesn't matter that the monster in Jaws doesn't make a lot of sense. There was and is precious little to suggest that sharks prey on humans for sport; more people die every year from falling coconuts than being eaten by sharks. But the film is not so much about killer sharks as it is about characters being confronted by an unstoppable force which they never faced before and cannot hope to understand. It could almost be called the father of Hallowe'en in its contrast of peaceful, boring middle-class life with a ruthless, blood-hungry predator.This contrast is best observed in the opening section of the film. Having given us a great early jump with the death of the skinny-dipper, Spielberg withholds the shark to build up the relationships between the townsfolk. We see Roy Scheider's sleepy world slowly descend into panic and really feel his frustration when the town council and the press ignore his demands about closing the beach. As the children enter the water to swim and the attack begins, the dramatic irony kicks in and what was once a perfectly ordinary and rational community is torn apart forever.Much has been written about the production problems which Spielberg faced on Jaws which meant he could not shoot as much of the shark as he wanted. Three full-scale mechanical sharks were built for the production, and all three regularly failed due to everything from short circuits to corroding skin and getting caught in seaweed. Such failures were one of the main reasons the film went so far over-schedule and over-budget: what started as a $4m movie shooting for 55 days ended up as a $9m movie that shot for 159 days.In the end, the problems with the shark were not merely serendipitous: they helped to create one of the defining features of the film. Because he could not show the monster as he wanted, Spielberg had to improvise with different techniques which could hint at what the shark was capable of doing. It's testament to his ability as a filmmaker that he could achieve so much threat and suspense from little more than a dorsal fin and a few barrels - enhanced by his use of the former to comedic effect early in the film. Through these techniques, the shark takes on a quality of amorphous evil whose only real equal at the time was Rover from The Prisoner.

But as before, Jaws is less about the shark than the characters reacting to it, and no matter how much of the action revolves around 'Bruce', we keep coming back to the people. In its second hour, where most of the action takes places on the Orca, we genuinely bond with this foolhardy trio and soak up all the conflicts within their personalities. Brody's determination to protect his family is contrasted by Quint's obsessive streak and Hooper's feeling of being - no pun intended - a fish out of water.As with The Sting, Robert Shaw dominates every scene that he is in. His accent may be a little harder to pin down this time, but his piercing intensity and unkempt manner give him unrivalled screen presence. Although much of his early lines are played for comedy, to set him up as a loose cannon against the uptight Brody and Hooper, he gradually takes on a more intense, obsessive quality which lead you to wonder whether or not the shark has driven him mad.The best scene in Jaws comes when the three men are sitting in the boat at night and Quint begins talking about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. In a speech co-written by John Milius (who scripted Apocalypse Now), he talks about his experience with sharks in the same way that Colonel Kurtz talked about horror - as something to be somehow embraced and understood, even at the cost of one's sanity or soul. The dialogue in this section is reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway's work in The Old Man and the Sea, with man and nature locked in battle, both mentally and physically, while all around there is only silence.Jaws remains a high-water mark in Spielberg's career and in those of all the performers. It isn't as relentless as Hallowe'en in its ability to sustain fear, and Spielberg's work on the Indiana Jones series would eventually surpass it. But that is mere nit-picking in the face of a film of great craft and vision, a film which proves that simple entertainment can be smart and that, under the right circumstances, people enjoy being scared.

Rating:
Verdict: Pure and simple terror

All The President's Men (USA, 1976)
Directed by Alan J. Pakula
Starring Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Martin Balsam, Hal Holbrook

1976 saw the release of two great films about journalism which remain gripping and compelling even though the professions they examined have long since changed dramatically. In one corner, we have Network, a film which anticipated the move towards ratings-driven TV news with a career-best performance from Peter Finch. In the other corner, we have All The President's Men, perhaps the greatest film ever made about print journalism and one of the all-time greatest thrillers.The first miracle of All The President's Men is that it manages to be a superbly tense conspiracy thriller even though we already know what the conspiracy is. Films which attempt to capture the political or social zeitgeist (in this case the fall of Richard Nixon) either date very badly or are often found wanting dramatically; they presume that there is no need to do the legwork, since we know how it ends even before we start.

All The President's Men gets the balance absolutely pitch-perfect between the facts and the drama. Robert Redford, who also produced the film, insisted that everything that played out on screen was factually accurate, to the point of liaising between screenwriter William Goldman and the real-life journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to ensure that every detail was correct. Those of us who are knowledgeable about Nixon and Watergate can watch the film and admire how well all the pieces fit together and all the facts are checked, while those less familiar will soak up all the information, admiring the work of the journalists and the screenwriter, who conveys all the twists, turns and dead ends.Being this factually accurate pays off in dramatic terms for two reasons. Firstly, it means that the film's political stance, if it has one, is not so blatantly obvious that it weighs the action down, as with Redford's Lions for Lambs. But more importantly, it demonstrates that the filmmakers have confidence in the material, believing the truth to be so extraordinary in its own right that to dress it up in Hollywood convention or other such artifice would do the audience a great disservice.Because the film is so relentlessly focussed on the story, the audience become like junior reporters following Woodward and Bernstein around, desperately trying to keep up and learn on the job. Like real-life journalists we are receiving information from a range of sources with varying degrees of reliability, to the point at which we almost feel the need to take notes. The dialogue is rattled off at a pace which makes even The Social Network look choreographed and considered.Unlike so many contemporary thrillers, All The President's Men manages to be so completely understated, keeping a lid on things and building tension throughout its running time. All of the big revelations come out through small tics in the dialogue; there are no great swathes of exposition to remind the audience what has happened so far. It takes us two hours to get to Deep Throat finally telling Woodward what he wants to hear in the car park; like Woodward, we have had to earn this information through patience and perseverance.The sense of tension created by the revelation of events and the pressure on the characters means that the film has no real need for action set-pieces or choreographed thrills. The closest things approaching action sequences are little pops of paranoia surrounding Woodward in the last hour - the disturbance in the car park, or the two journalists typing out their conversations for fear that they are being bugged. That's not to say that set-pieces in themselves are a bad thing, or a sign of dumbing-down in Hollywood movie-making. But All The President's Men simply doesn't need them - it does things the hard way, which turns out to be the smart way and the right way.It would be very easy to praise this film on purely nostalgic grounds, coming from a time when thrillers didn't have to end with explosions, and when there was 'proper' investigative journalism instead of commercially-minded, celebrity-saturated hearsay. But the makers of All The President's Men would not accept this rose-tinted view of journalism, and the film specifically warns not to take such days for granted. Long before Rupert Murdoch's empire-building, the conflict between money and the truth was present, and crucially the truth didn't always win hands down.
There are several arguments in the film about the freedom of the press and its independence from the state and government. This conflict is present in the initial disagreements between Woodward and Bernstein which govern their different styles of reporting. Woodward is the newcomer who believes in facts above everything else; he types up his article, only for Bernstein, the seasoned hack who likes something with flair, to polish it behind his back.

In one scene about halfway through, the two reporters are in a car arguing about the difference between fact and gut instinct. Woodward use the example of snow falling overnight, or a man stopping and asking for directions, to demonstrate that one cannot simply rely on logical presumptions to be sure that something happened. Bernstein's responses, while broadly in agreement, belie a disagreement between substance and style, graft and guesswork which would come to shape the industry.As a paean to 'proper' journalism, the film is a lot more subtle than something like Good Night and Good Luck, which used stock footage of Joseph McCarthy to hammer its point home in every scene. And unlike George Clooney's film, All The President's Men does a brilliant job of showing the fear and intimidation involved in the profession and practice of journalism. This is present throughout Woodward and Bernstein's work, from the persistent refusal of people to go on the record, to the pressure coming from their bosses who are staking the reputation of their paper on what could be an entirely spurious story. Woodward and Bernstein are forced to balance their own personal ambitions within the paper, the desire to protect people from exposure and ruin and the need to tell the truth - something which is no easy task.All The President's Men is also masterful at making the very act of writing exciting. As I mentioned in my review of Adaptation, it is very difficult to put the physical act of writing or typing on screen in a manner which is genuinely cinematic. But Alan J. Pakula achieves this in his directorial style, which is completely unfussy and marked by great attention to detail. So accomplished is his direction that you almost don't notice it, which might explain why he is so underrated as a filmmaker. The tension he builds makes one focus on all the random doodles on Woodward's notepad, and the typing scene is very well-paced.The performances in All The President's Men are all front-page material. Robert Redford is great, proving that he was more than just the pretty face from Butch Cassidy and The Sting and carrying himself with poise and conviction. Dustin Hoffman gives some of his best work as Carl Bernstein, resisting the temptation to 'over-method' as he did in Marathon Man the same year. And there is a terrific supporting role for Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat. Holbrook, best known for his appearance in The Fog, brings a murky edge to the character which not only conveys the danger of his situation, but leads you to believe that he is no good either.All The President's Men is a proper thinking-person's thriller with great direction, superb performances and an impeccable script. Though the worlds of both politics and journalism may have changed, the film's ideas and approach remain as fresh and bracing as they were 35 years ago. Whether as a paean to journalism or an argument for political accountability, a debate about the nature of truth or a thrill-a-minute drama, it succeeds on every conceivable level, resulting in a movie for the ages.

Rating:
Verdict: A conspiracy thriller worthy of the front page

The Sting (USA, 1973)
Directed by George Roy Hill
Starring Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Robert Shaw, Charles Durning

It is very tempting to hate The Sting for beating The Exorcist to the Best Picture Oscar. Some would even go so far as to rank it alongside Crash and How Green Was My Valley is one of the Academy's greatest faux pas. But whatever vitriol the other two deserve, The Sting still holds up as a damn fine film, with all the essential ingredients of a proper American caper.Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting is very deliberately nostalgic and old-fashioned. Both films romanticise key aspects of American history, something which is evident in everything from the jazz-inflected dialogue to the washed-out visuals, right down to The Sting's family-friendly PG certificate. One of the most obvious expressions of this old-school approach is the editing. William H. Reynolds' transitions are all slow wipes and frames twisting on each other, and the film ends with an iris wipe of our two heroes walking off into the distance, like the characters in Looney Tunes.In line with this romantic depiction of 1930s Chicago, The Sting's tone is playful and breezy even in its most threatening moments. The Scott Joplin ragtime soundtrack gives every scene a precise sense of pace and momentum, and as with Howard Shore's work on The Lord of the Rings, the action fits the music so well you can't believe the actors weren't choreographing their movements to it on set. The film nestles somewhere between a Technicolor musical and the original version of Scarface, combining all that bright and cheerful about melodramas with all that is suspenseful about crime films.Aside from its similarity to Butch Cassidy, the closest comparison to The Sting would have to be Chinatown, since both films depict a similar era from a 1970s vantage point and have incredibly twisty stories. In terms of the period touches and historical accuracy, you couldn't put a playing card between them. But Chinatown is the better film, not because it is darker or more hard-hitting, but because it has more conscious and lucid intentions.

Because Roman Polanski approached the Californian water wars as an outsider, he could be as savage as he liked about the American dream and drive home his arguments about contemporary America. For all its period glamour and elegant noir touches, Chinatown feels like it is constantly driving forward and asking you to keep up, with Polanski leaving nothing to chance to reel you in and break your heart. Because George Roy Hill has such massive affection for the period and lifestyle he is depicting, The Sting occasionally feels like a film which wants to stop and admire the view even when things are becoming crucial. At two hours long, it's still an efficient piece of storytelling, but it does feel like a film with a lot less to say.There are two aspects of The Sting which hold the film together, both as a piece of breezy entertainment and as a really good thriller in which everything adds up. The first is the storytelling, which is accessible without being facile and complex without being convoluted. The use of old-fashioned title cards explains where we are for people not old or informed enough to understand the twists, while the various cheats and increasingly elaborate bluffing keeps the rest of us guessing.

The Sting is a film about conning in which everyone is conning or being conned by everyone else - a premise that could quickly get out of hand. But Hill and the cast get around this, drawing the audience in with the charm of the characters so they we not only indulge their play-acting, we encourage it. In the opening con involving Robert Redford and Robert Earl Jones (the father of Darth Vader), Hill's camera is there as a passive observer, never intervening by getting in close and thereby making their actions look believable. Hence when we find out what was really in the wallet, we not only don't feel bad for being tricked, but we find ourselves rooting for these guys.The other key aspect is Robert Shaw, whose performance as Doyle Lonnegan is the best of his career. Lonnegan is the most complex character in the film, someone who has hidden his own past to shore up credibility and who has risen to the top by outsmarting his opponents before cutting them out of their own operations. Shaw is a naturally intimidating screen presence, and in sharp contrast to Paul Newman and Redford his actions are constantly restrained and understated.As is so often the way, the most interesting part of Shaw's characterisation happened by accident. A week before filming, he slipped on a wet handball court and split all the ligaments in his right knee. Rather than delay filming, Shaw had to wear a knee brace under the wide trousers, resulting in a staggered and uneven gait. The impediment is noticeable when Lonnegan enters the salon, keeping his right leg absolutely straight as he slowly hobbles the steps. This subtle touch gives the character extra reasoning behind his ruthless approach, while also reassuring the audience that he is not invincible.The best scene in The Sting is the poker game which Newman joins on the train between New York and Chicago (ironically posing as a bookie called 'Shaw'). Instead of Scott Joplin, the scene is given rhythm by the background noise of the train, making the silences all the more unbearable. Shaw's face barely alters save for little flickers in his eyes and his mouth, and yet he manages to move from calmness to smirking confidence to seething fury all in five minutes. And then there is the great guessing point - how on earth did Gondorff manage to cheat?This latter point hints at the other great success of The Sting: the lack of excessive exposition. The film expects audiences not only to follow the plot but to have a working understanding of poker - or at the very least, be aware of the wider significance of the cards being played. Despite the fact that at no point the rules of either poker or the cons are explained in any great detail, you don't have to be an expert in either to follow the story. Compare that with the poker in The Cincinnati Kid, in which every move is explained and the camera is darting all over the place, desperately trying to make the scenes dramatic but having the opposite effect.Alongside Shaw's performance, there are other dark elements of The Sting which reference characters familiar to filmgoers of the day. The character of Snyder, the rogue FBI agent hunting down Hooker way outside his jurisdiction, bears some similarity to Popeye Doyle in The French Connection: like Gene Hackman, he pulls no punches and leaves no stone unturned to do his job. The idea of female assassins had become popular in the James Bond series, with such characters appearing in both From Russia with Love and Thunderball. And the black leather gloves worn by the hidden figure tailing Hooker is a possible reference to Dr. Strangelove.The Sting is not an unqualified success. It is ultimately very light-headed even in its serious moments, and in the conclusion of the final con involving the FBI it does descend a little into silliness. But it is very hard to take against a series of such enjoyable and well-judged performances, complimented by an engagingly complicated story. While it doesn't have the cult appeal of Butch Cassidy, it is an improvement on that work, and remains a must-see 1970s crime film.

Rating: 4/5
Verdict: Breezy, twisty and damned enjoyable